by Emily Hahn
The months went by. Violet moved on to Singapore. Iris went up to Tsingtao for a summer holiday, and Gyppo came back with three Russians he had found in Tientsin. He said they were French and called them Fifi, etc., but they were Russians.
“It’s just a prejudice in the trade,” Annette explained. “The men like to think the girls are French, especially for exhibition work. There’s a good deal in it, too; whenever Gyppo brings a real French girl out here she’s a great attraction. He knows his job; he’s a hard worker. Look at the way he keeps moving them around. You have to keep moving around in this business.”
“Should I?” asked Jill humbly. “Do you think I ought to go somewhere else for a change?”
“It wouldn’t hurt,” Annette replied. “You’re looking sort of peaked anyway. I’d a lot rather you go out of town, you know, than see you going into another Shanghai house.”
Thinking it over, Jill decided to take advantage of an offer which one Mr. Kwai had made her. It was really a magnificent offer on the surface. Jill was to go to Europe, anywhere she chose, though Mr. Kwai thought England would be best. He would pay her way, and he suggested she travel by air, over the Russian route, or at least by the Siberian railway. She was not to stay very long, because–and this was the hidden reason for Mr. Kwai’s generosity–he wanted her to carry something out of China for him and he wanted something else brought back. It was a very small parcel of papers and a little money going out, he explained; it would most likely be a packet of something on the way back. Mr. Kwai was anxious to impress on Jill that she should not speak of her errand to anyone, not even Annette.
Long after the hasty trip had been forgotten Jill sometimes wondered how many other women had been used for smuggling in the same way. She never inquired too closely of Mr. Kwai what she carried. It was probably better not to know, and she was eager for the journey; she did not want to scare him out of giving it to her. It was all very simple, as it turned out. She crossed by the Siberian railway, traveling three weeks in the train, and on the way she had a hasty love affair with a Russian soldier who could speak no English but who helped her to get things to eat whenever they stopped at a station. She hoped he would be equally helpful in Moscow, but he disappeared as soon as the tourist agency took charge of her. Jill was favorably impressed by Moscow, not so much because of what she saw as by the books she read about the Soviet when she reached London. Iris had given her a one-sided view of the country, she reflected. There was a good deal to be said for a system that tried to give everybody a square deal. In the new world promised by the Russian Communists a girl like Jill would be able to know everybody; she could come out into the light and feel equal to all those haughty women in Shanghai, for example. Certainly that Russian soldier had been charming.… Everybody was nice to her in Moscow.
She had been told that prostitution was forbidden in the Soviet. An excellent thing, pondered Jill. The sooner prostitution was done away with all over the world, the happier girls would be.
“I could keep all my money then,” she thought. “I wouldn’t have to give Annette half.”
Moreover, if Communism were to triumph, people like Sanyi would most certainly be dragged out and shot as they deserved.
“I guess I must be a Communist,” said Jill.
She came back to Shanghai by air, delivering safely to Mr. Kwai the little packet she had collected in London. He was very pleased about it. She supposed it was drugs, or maybe something to do with politics: it didn’t matter. At any rate, Mr. Kwai paid her well. They were glad, too, to have her back again at Annette’s.
“It does you good, it does them good; it’s good all round to keep moving in this business,” said Annette. “Your old boy friend, B. W. Liu, has been around a few times, asking for you.”
“Oh, has he?” Jill stood and stared at Annette suspiciously. “You didn’t introduce him to anybody else, by any chance?”
“Certainly not. The idea,” said Annette with great vigor. “I wouldn’t do a thing like that to you, Jill. You are a silly girl.”
Upstairs Jill asked a newcomer from Singapore, casually, if anyone had met her old acquaintance, B. W.
“The little banker?” asked the Singapore girl. “Oh, I know him; Annette kept trying to suit him, but he didn’t take to any of us. He was polite enough, but—” She snapped her fingers.
Jill wondered if the warmth at her heart was anything more than professional pride. Whatever it was, it was a sensation to which she had long been a stranger, and Annette had nothing to do with it. She felt a little hurt by Annette; not much, but a little. She was oddly glad, however, to be back. She was quite eager to tell B. W. all about Russia.
“I don’t feel well,” insisted Jill.
Annette looked at her darkly and placed her hands on her capacious brown silk hips. “There’s nothing the matter with you but the sulks,” she said. “How long are you going to lie there in bed getting trays and making a lot of trouble?”
Jill’s lower lip shoved out like a baby’s. Her voice trembled. “I can’t get up. I don’t feel strong enough to get up.”
“But, good lord, Jill, the doctor says there’s nothing the matter with you! No temperature, no pain you can put a finger to, and you can’t be needing another holiday so soon as all that. Come on now, be a good girl and try to get well.”
“I do try.” Only when she was telling a lie was Jill’s blue-eyed gaze quite so wide. “I do try, Annette. I don’t care what the doctor says, I don’t feel well. Maybe it’s my lungs.”
Annette sank down in a rocking chair near the bed, grunting as her skirts settled themselves. “I don’t want to be hard on you, Jill, though goodness knows I’m shorthanded right now, but why can’t you girls give a little thought to something besides your own fancies? I do what I can for you, don’t I? Don’t I always send you straight off to the doctor when there’s something a little–well, when you’re Sick?”
Jill admitted this.
“Don’t I pay half the bill when that happens, even though it isn’t in our contract?”
“Yes,” said Jill in her baby voice. “You’re very careful of me, Annette.”
“Well, then. I’m not unreasonable, but I must say when I know, sure as anything, there’s nothing the matter with you really, it’s all mental—”
Jill began to cry.
“Oh lord,” sighed Annette, and struggled gaspingly to her feet. “Stop that, you Jill. Nobody’s being mean to you. Nobody says you’ve got to get up tonight. I just want you to make an effort. See if you don’t feel more like it tomorrow.”
“All right,” said Jill faintly. “I’ll try.”
Annette waddled to the door.
“Annette,” said Jill in a louder voice, “if B. W. comes tonight—”
“Well?” asked Annette, pausing and looking over her shoulder.
“I wouldn’t mind his coming up to see me,” said Jill, “if he wants. Ask him if he’d mind.”
“Somebody’ll have to show him the way.” Annette’s voice was heavily sarcastic. “That fellow’s never been upstairs, I do believe. All right, Jill, I’ll send him up when he comes.”
She disappeared around the door, and a moment later her voice was heard upraised in wrath against some servant who had neglected to dust the banisters. Jill yawned, blew her nose, and picked up a book. She settled back in the pillows and bent her pretty eyebrows over the fine type. Everything was silent in the room, everything except the little traveling clock she had bought in London. She sighed and yawned again and let the book slide down on the counterpane. It was Marx’s Capital.
A soft footstep halted at the door, and a girl in a wrapper peered in, standing there with hushed breath. Feeling her presence, Jill at last turned her head on the pillows. Their eyes met, to the confusion of the girl in the wrapper.
“Oh, you’re awake. I just thought—Can I do something for you?”
“Oh, thank you, Fifi; no, I don’t want anything. It’s very sweet of you.”
&n
bsp; Fifi hurried on down the hall, and Jill looked after her with a speculative frown. She got up and then walked across the room, small and frail in her white pajamas, and opened a drawer in her bureau. Some paper money lay there on the bare boards in a modest little roll.
“I wonder,” said Jill to herself. She picked up the money, looked around for her handbag, then slipped the money into her pajama pocket. Far away, down in the front hall, she heard the doorbell and skipped nimbly back to her pillows and Karl Marx.
“I bet it was Fifi who pinched that money last Saturday,” she thought. “It must be, her or Nina.”
She looked dutifully at the printed page, but her mind went on, following its own independent path. “I hope it was Fifi; I’d hate to think Nina— But you can’t trust anybody. Annette herself would just as soon take my money if she could be sure I wouldn’t find out. Why should Fifi be prowling around here if she wasn’t looking for something like that? It’s awful,” thought Jill, kicking against her sheet and bouncing Marx impatiently. “It’s awful, living like this where you can’t trust anybody. I’d rather stay anywhere else. I’m just about fed up with Annette’s.” She tried again to read the words on the page. “I’ll never get away from here,” she thought suddenly. “Never! I’ll probably die and be buried from here.”
Vividly she saw the funeral cortege winding away from the front driveway, with Tony watching it from his station within the door, not a muscle in his face moving. There were no mourners. Inside the house Fifi was ransacking Jill’s old room, with the door locked, and out in the hall Annette and the other girls kept knocking, demanding to be let in so they could help in the hunt.
Jill gave up Marx for good and sobbed into her pillow.
“Poor little girl,” said B. W. “What is the matter with you, Jill?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I just feel tired. I don’t feel well, that’s all. I’m homesick, but I don’t know what for.”
“You are unhappy. It is Annette; she is cruel to you. You must not—”
B. W. began to walk up and down the room agitatedly. He looked like a small, neat boy, or like Felix the Cat. He halted and wheeled about and came over to the bed again. Annette had spoken the truth; in spite of all he had spent in the house, this was the first time he had ever been in Jill’s bedroom.
“You must come away, out of this,” he said. “I have been meaning to speak about it for some time; my brother and I have agreed that it is not right for you to stay here. Annette does not take care of you.”
Jill began to weep quietly into her pillow. She hoped B. W. would go on talking; she liked his soothing tone. Besides, she wanted to think while he talked. She did think, with such concentration that she allowed a pause to grow to awkward length before she knew he was waiting for a reply. Staring at him woefully, she let him repeat his question: “Have you had a doctor?”
She cried a little more. “No, Annette won’t get me one.”
This statement, an arrant falsehood, made him hiss sharply and wheel about to walk up and down some more. “You see,” he said as he marched, “this is impossible. Impossible.”
“But I can’t go away,” said Jill in a tiny voice, wiping her eyes. She had quite made up her mind to go with him; she was, she realized, completely fed up with Annette’s.
“Of course you can go,” said B. W., and he came over and sat on the edge of the bed. “Why not? You told me you don’t like this life; isn’t that true?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Very well, why follow this course? You need not do it if you don’t want to. What would you really like, Jill?” He found her hand and began to pat it. “What would you like to do? My brother and I are willing–no, we are anxious–to help you. We will take care of you until you can make a new start. Tell me, what do you want to do?”
“I would like,” said Jill falteringly, “to be honest. I would like to be good and earn my living like other girls.” She hung her head. For the moment it was the truth; she was sincere, through and through.
B. W. kept patting her head, patting and patting it. “Very well, that is what you will do, Jill. We will get you a place to live and you can learn something at school, some way to earn a little money if you like. Would you like to be a typist? Then perhaps my brother would give you a job in the bank, but that is as you like. You need not worry about the money.”
“I would love to work in the bank,” said Jill, bursting afresh into tears. “But can I ever do that? Will nice women speak to me if I learn to be a typist? I’m so afraid, B. W., it’s too late! Could I really, do you think?”
“Of course you can. Of course. Poor little girl, it’s going to be all right. Now I’m going outside to speak to Annette while you get dressed. Pack your things and I’ll take you to the Park for now, and tomorrow you shall look for an apartment. Don’t cry any more, Jill; you’re safe now. It’s all over.”
It was an ecstatic business, packing her clothes and being wafted out of Annette’s under B. W.’s hovering protection. It was exactly like something in a play, she felt, or a movie. The incident was all on an exalted plane. Everything was clear-cut and tense, from the glimpse she stole of herself in the hall mirror, pale and tear-stained and lovely, to the brief interview with Annette, who was standing at the front door to see her off. Annette was offhand and cheerful about it all; Jill wondered how much B. W. had paid to put her into that placid mood.
“Well, good-by, Jill,” she said, shaking hands. “Take care of yourself now, and give me a ring when you’re settled down.”
“Oh yes, I will, Annette. Good-by. Good-by, everybody!”
It was just like going off to be married, she said to herself. B. W.’s car, which usually waited discreetly down the street, had been brought to the driveway, and his chauffeur put the suitcases into the front seat. Just as B. W. handed her tenderly and helpfully into the back, Jill turned for one last look at the house. Tony was standing at the open door, watching her. Tony’s face was always the same, so it must have been her imagination that made him look so scornfully amused. It must have been. Tony’s face never showed what he was thinking.
Still, no doubt Tony had thoughts, even so. As he stepped back and closed the door, and as the car started, Jill’s happy pretense about the wedding was forgotten, and she began again to cry.
“Don’t cry,” said B. W., putting his thin little arm around her. “Please don’t cry. You aren’t alone in the world. People love you, Jill; many people love you. I love you, Jill. Don’t cry.”
“But do you?”
“You know I do. But I am so shy; I am a fool.”
“You’re not a fool.” She leaned against him and blew her nose. “You’re a darling. You’ve saved my life.”
“No, no, no.” He was delighted. He chuckled. “Dear little Jill,” he said, and held her tight in his arm. “No more Annette’s!”
“No more Annette’s,” she repeated obediently. Again she thought of Tony’s bland stare, his flat eyes watching her as she stepped into the car.
“You need never think about it again,” said B. W. “It’s finished, gone, forgotten.”
“Forgotten,” echoed Jill.
IX
By the time Jill was enrolled at the business college she had become inured to certain difficulties which seemed to be chronic for a girl wishing to go straight. There was the difficulty of explaining her background. There was the difficulty of accounting for her presence in Shanghai at all. But neither of these was of any importance compared with the enormous difficulty of her address.
Jill lived at Broadway Mansions. The Mansions were the newest of the new flat buildings now appearing all over Shanghai in answer to a real estate boom. They looked impressively luxurious, but the luxury lay more in veneer and rent than in space. You lived in a one-room flat, with a couch-bed, an enameled phone, and a new electric fan, or you spread yourself and occupied more than one apartment, lavishing precious floor allotment on cocktail bars, dressing rooms, and whateve
r. But even the one-room flats were expensive enough. Broadway Mansions was designed for prosperous business people who didn’t mind living between the shopping district and the slums, and their name was legion. American buyers lived there, and some of the younger diplomats, and as many wealthy Chinese as could get in. Also, several pretty ladies without visible means of support. But the Mansions were not family flats, and no other inhabitant of them went to a humble business college, as Jill did.
The rest of it–background, reasons for being in Shanghai, and all that–could be compounded for in private conversation with her fellow students. Jill was not worried about that. But on the day of registration, when she stood in a straggling line with half-a-dozen strange girls waiting their turn to be entered on the books, she suddenly realized how she was going to sound. A few girls standing ahead of her were giving their addresses.
“Maria Basto,” one of them announced herself. She was a pretty, sallow girl with black hair. “Portuguese.” Or rather, Jill noted mechanically, Macanese of mixed ancestry–Chinese, Portuguese, Filipino, and perhaps a dash of blood from Goa. Nearly all of the girls who were not Chinese looked as if they had Asiatic blood, though after living in Shanghai for a year or two you began to think the same of everyone you saw.
Maria Basto gave her address: Apartment 17C at some house with a large number in Avenue Pétain. Gloria Ching, standing next in line, lived in Kiukiang Road, evidently in another apartment house. Lina Rozefsky came from Hongkew. They were all slender little things with cheap permanent waves that had left their hair frizzy. Jill was seized by a violent terror. How could she step up to the desk after that and say, loud and clear, “Broadway Mansions”?
Never for a moment did she reflect that it was a trifle: that even if anyone troubled to listen to her address they would not think of wondering. Jill forgot that blessed tolerance of a big city. She had never felt the presence of thousands of people to whom life in Shanghai was a simple matter of their own concerns. Even the largest city in the world, she was convinced, was not big enough to give her a hiding place. A girl with her record could never hide, she thought; it had been insane of B. W. to think it possible.
