by Emily Hahn
What was the use, anyway, of training as a typist? It was no good. It would never be any good. Somebody would come along almost immediately, no doubt, and spoil it all by telling the teacher how she had been one of Annette’s girls.
All of a sudden she found herself alone, standing there at the registrar’s desk. Nobody but the registrar himself need know, after all, the shameful secret that she was living at Broadway Mansions. The relief of it made her dizzy, but she managed to finish with the formalities, and she paid for the first month. She was a student, after all, a candidate for some honest job in the future, a girl among the working girls.
Hurrying home that afternoon, she repudiated an unbidden thought that the Mansions were, after all, a pleasant place to live. No, she would not care for such outward things. The essentials were what mattered. The smooth-running lift, the sharp clean look of the corridor, the quiet order of her room, which servants had tidied for her in her absence–none of that was important. As soon as she was a trained typist she would leave all this and find herself something else, within her own means. She could take a room at some one of the college girls’ homes, perhaps; several of them had been very friendly.
“Oh, it’s wonderful, it’s simply wonderful!” she said over the phone to B. W. “I’m so happy I can’t tell you.… The girls? They are very nice; some of them are sweet little things. Oh, Uncle?” That was the name she had for B. W. “Uncle, do you think–if one of these girls asks me to tea or something, what shall I do about inviting her back? I can’t bring her here, do you think? … No, that’s what I thought too.”
B. W. was nervously lavish with suggestions. There was the Chocolate Shop, he reminded her, and any number of other confectioneries and cafés. Later, he said, a better sort of home could be arranged for her, perhaps; there was no need to stay forever at Broadway Mansions if she didn’t care to.
The first two days, with their unwonted discipline, left Jill tired by five o’clock but glowing with hope. The girls were still unknown quantities to their teacher; beginners together, they struggled with the mysteries of shorthand in the morning and tried to keep their fingering smooth and accurate on the typewriters in the afternoon. One or two of them, having had some practice already, tried to show off a little, but they were soon smacked down by the teacher, a rather grim woman with a true passion for her work.
“She’s an old trout,” muttered Maria Basto to Jill, “especially when she starts picking on you. But she does turn out good stenos, and she finds you the jobs. That’s why I came to her instead of going somewhere else.”
“Less noise, please, and more attention,” said the teacher. An orgy of drill kept them all quiet for the next hour and a half, but at lunch time Jill walked down the Bund with Maria. She felt so secure, so steeped in her new school and her new friendship, that even when she recognized a former client in a group coming her way she was not unduly rattled. Thinking quickly, she decided to cut him dead, in the unlikely possibility that he should not do the same with her. She had already learned that the schoolgirls were sharp-eyed and noticed everything that went on in the street, so she sailed past Captain Thomas with her nose in the air, leaving him wondering if he had mistaken her identity. In a way, of course, he had: she reminded herself of that and hugged the thought.
“Why can’t you come over for tea tomorrow night?” asked Maria. “I’d love you to meet my people. Mamma will be crazy about you; you’ve got such a lovely way of speaking. You know, I noticed you right away, you looked so shy. I could of guessed you came from somewhere else.”
“I was a bit frightened.”
“Naturally, with all us hard cases knowing each other already. How you doing in shorthand?”
Jill sighed sharply. “I can’t seem to go fast enough. I don’t know how some of you do it.”
“Aw, it’s just a knack. You’ll catch on. Shorthand’s three fourths the battle; you got to take a lot of dictation in some of the best jobs. Know what I want? I want to work in a bank. An American bank. They pay good, and they treat you nice.”
It was rather startling to discover that Maria’s idea of good pay was the same sum for a week as Annette’s fixed tariff for one trip upstairs. Jill’s blue gaze at the traffic became fixed and glassy as she did mental arithmetic. She had never before buckled down to such details in regard to that projected life of purity. It was going to be rather costly, going straight. On the other hand, B. W. and the rest would certainly save a lot of money on her.…
Maria’s people were extraordinarily kind to Jill. At least that is how they seemed to her. It had been years since she had been made welcome in a family group. She was taken in and admired like a French doll and fussed over and regaled with tea and food. The experience was so intoxicating that she was not disturbed by their frank, kindly curiosity. Maria’s mamma was an enormous lady, faintly mustached, who would have tipped the scales at about three times Maria’s weight, and she shot questions at her daughter’s new friend like bullets from a tommy gun. In a warm, clipped accent that explained Maria’s slight uncertainty in English, she tried to find out a dozen things. Why was Jill living all alone? She was really astonished that any human being should live alone; in their four-room flat the Bastos numbered twelve people, and they liked it that way. Had poor Jill no relatives, then, no one to protect her? Was there not even someone for Jill to protect–no ailing mother, no young sister or brother to put through school? Really not? She was really alone? Incredible! Incredible and also dangerously unnatural; she, Mamma Basto, would set about remedying the situation as soon as might be. In the meantime Maria must arrange it that Jill meet some young people.
“Even one of my no-good boys,” said Mamma Basto, “can take you to the club with Maria, so you can dance and swim and enjoy yourself. Poor little girl. So pale! Such pretty hair! Why, you will be married in no time. Not so, Papa?”
Papa, who was smaller than Mamma but sported a larger mustache, agreed silently. He smiled, however, and drank off a cup of tea through the mustache and agreed that Jill was a perfect picture of a little angel. The children and the brothers and the aunts and the uncles all smiled and played a dutiful chorus to Mamma and were genuinely nice to Jill, while Maria felt proud at having produced such a sensation.
Under the soft sympathy of so many dark eyes Jill expanded and blossomed like the rose. She explained her presence in Shanghai, her aloneness, her mother’s absence (her mother had died, she said, at her birth), and the entire situation with a story that spun on and on, taking in many fascinating extra threads as it meandered. She talked under inspiration. She talked with a fluency which would have been the envy of Annette’s most accomplished liars, and for the time being she believed every word of it. Warmly conscious of her social success, she said good night at last and left them to a long, excited discussion of herself.
Out of that warm bath of kindliness the reaction seized her; she shivered in the night going home. A sharp breeze blew off the river, or she thought it did, and struck at her like a blade of ice. Suppose they had guessed the truth! What then? How long would they be left in peace to admire her, even at the best? What hope was there that she could go on indefinitely like this?
Did she even want security in the world of the Bastos? She remembered their home. Out of that warm bath, naked to the cruel cold wind off the long river, she turned against the Bastos like a savage little rat. “If I can’t have it I don’t want it anyway,” she said to herself; “who wants to live like that? The furniture was old and tawdry. Maria’s clothes were not good. That was a horrible crowd of people to be living like that, all in together like matches in a box.
“The air was bad,” she recalled. “It smelled of cooking and sweat. I bet they never open the windows, either.
“You would think,” she said defensively, “you would think anyone would want to live in a better place than that. You would think that old man would be able to manage better, with so many sons and daughters getting big enough to work.” People who coul
d manage and still did not manage were no better, decided Jill, than animals.
“I don’t see how that delicate girl can bear a home like that,” she thought. “How can she live with such a limited outlook? All she’s got on her mind is a job with an American bank; she’s a clever girl, too, and no doubt it’s one of the highest ambitions in the school. I suppose she must know; there wouldn’t be any better positions.”
Again she thought of that salary Maria had mentioned with such admiration and longing. But that was dreadful! How could they expect anybody to live on a salary like that? And yet Maria’s home was a fairly good one, she knew, compared with many others. Shanghai swarmed with girls like Maria trying to get good steady jobs in banks. It was borne in upon Jill that everyday life for most of her companions was not so much a matter of working toward a bright goal as of keeping the places they already occupied–holding their own. She drew back from the discovery. She drew back, figuratively speaking, from the pool into which she had so longed to dive. The idea of losing herself forever in the crowd of pretty, chattering schoolgirls became suddenly appalling instead of tempting.
Back in the flat, her mood swung around again. For a long time she sat in the dark at her window, looking out over the Whangpoo that flowed beneath her wall like black oil. There were lights farther up the Bund, and a string of paler, pinkish lights marked the curving progress of Broadway Road from Garden Bridge toward the end of town on the Hongkew side. Rising straight and strangely tall at the flat bank of the creek, Broadway Mansions stood in comparative shadow. Jill could see a sort of luminosity in the air outside the windows below her, but she couldn’t see the lighted windows themselves, and she felt suspended in an air that was clear–clearer by far than the atmosphere one breathed down in the street. Up here there was no smell and no noise, not even from the remnants of the vegetable market that floated and fluctuated on the bosom of Soochow Creek.
“I wonder if I mightn’t find a priest someday soon. I wonder if he would mind too much about B. W. I shouldn’t think he would, when he knows about all the others and how I’ve quit all that; B. W. is so much better than Annette’s. He’s only one man.… But suppose I get a crabby one, and he says I’ve got to give up B. W. as well as the rest, especially because B. W. is married. What could I do then? I’m not ready yet.…” She stared out at the lights marching rather unsteadily along Broadway Road. It seemed at moments like this that she was engaged in a one-sided game. She was gambling against the chance that she would not die before coming to terms with the Infinite. In such moments of emptiness her chances of winning looked dim indeed.
Along in the third week the classes sorted themselves out. The teacher had selected her favorites and was coddling them, coaching them toward the glorious future she faithfully promised. She had also lost patience, finally and forever, with those girls she considered hopeless. But she did not go so far as to sling them out of the college, for if they were stubborn enough to continue paying for their tuition that was none of her affair. She was honest enough, however, to show her opinion in a decided manner, and many a girl already depressed by the mysteries of shorthand was forced to cower beneath the horrid publicity of the teacher’s angry shrieks. Between these extremes the bulk of the class plodded along without any extraordinary comment from her, either in encouragement or scathing rebuke.
First among the teacher’s pets was Maria Basto. She accepted encomiums in a pleasantly careless way. “Sure I’m speedy,” she said to Jill. “I’ve had practice already, see, and besides, I’ve always been quick with my hands. We all are. My brother Tony holds the shorthand record for the year he competed.”
“What’s his job?”
“Oh, he’s assistant to the chief clerk in one of the brokerage houses,” said Maria. “Salary? Oh, two hundred a month.”
“But what does the chief clerk get?” asked Jill.
“Well, I wouldn’t know, but he came out from England and naturally that’s figured on a pound sterling basis, so it’s a good deal more. You can’t ever count on getting much more than Tony if you’re a local fellow, Jill. There’s so much competition, you see; if Tony held out for more a dozen other fellows would be ready to take his place.”
“But it seems so unfair. I don’t understand.”
“Why,” said Maria patiently, “it’s like I say, competition. The people from Europe and America, they think we don’t need as much as they do to live. We can talk a bit of Chinese and buy cheaper than they do, for one thing, and we don’t pay such high rent.”
“But they wouldn’t be able to pay the rent if they didn’t get so much more money, and their Chinese boys do the shopping anyway. It’s crazy, Maria. It’s wrong. It goes around in a circle. Don’t you think it’s wrong? Don’t you get angry?”
Maria shrugged. “It’s always been that way. If I could get a job with an American bank, maybe someday they’d send me to the States, and then I could make lots more money and send it to Mamma. But of course they don’t send people to the States very often. Oh, gosh, I’d like to see Hollywood before I die.”
Jill was wandering off in a reverie of her own. As an ordinary typist her earning capacity was sadly limited in Shanghai, but suppose she made capital of being a British typist? She resolved to say nothing of this to Maria, but it seemed feasible.
“I wish I could pick it up, anyway, the way you do,” she said abruptly, for she belonged to that large group of girls who never distinguished themselves at all.
“Oh, you don’t have to worry, Jill. You’ll never have to work at anything very long.”
“Why?” Jill was frightened. “What do you mean?”
“You’ll be getting married,” said Maria. Jill did not reply.
Maria, her brother Tony, and three other young people arranged one afternoon to introduce their new friend Jill to the Kiangwan Country Club. It was a bright, warm day, and there was nothing particular to do at the club, but Jill was charmed by the outing. She was a good tennis player, though her game had been neglected ever since she arrived in Shanghai, and on the court she surprised the party. A furtive, hasty examination of the crowd when she first walked into the club had satisfied her that nobody there was likely to recognize her. The Kiangwan was not the country club, to which many of the richer white people of the city belonged, and of the Chinese members who had come out to play that afternoon she saw only young men and women; some of them were children or relatives, no doubt, of her friends, but they were none of them the friends themselves. Of course, she realized, it was a risk going to a public place at all. There must be many people in Shanghai who recognized her though she did not know them. But nothing awkward had happened for a long time, and she was growing brave.
After tennis they went into the pool. It was the best pool in Shanghai, bar none, Tony told her proudly. Except for their own party, there were not many swimmers, and after a few minutes of rowdy play with a large rubber ball everyone in and out and about the pool was talking to everyone else. Jill joined in as if she had been doing that sort of thing all her life, but she was moving and talking in a daze. Either the present moment was a dream, she felt, or all her former life had been an illusion. It was not possible that she had been one of Annette’s girls only two months before and yet was now an aspiring typist among typists, out for a healthy afternoon in the country.
She screamed in comic protest when the ball splashed near her, threw it violently among the struggling boys in the pool, and pulled herself up on the tiled edge to rest a moment. A young man was sitting near her, but she did not look at him. She wasn’t actually seeing anyone. She was moving in a dream.
The ball flew high from the water and hit the young man in the chest. “Oof!” he grunted. He cradled it in his arm, swung it back, and sent it skimming across the pool. “What the hell are they playing, Blondie? Water polo?” he said with a sort of good-humored indignation. His accent was true American and sounded aggressive after the singsong imitation Yankee of Maria’s set, who picked up thei
r English from the movies and visiting dance bands. Jill turned and looked at him. He was brown-haired and brown-eyed, and he had freckles.
“They haven’t any rules; they’re just larking.”
“Just larking, uh? Larking.” He tried the word out on his tongue, tasting it. Then he pointed at her accusingly. “You’re English!”
“No, I’m not. I’m British.”
“No, don’t tell me. Let me guess.” He studied her. “It wouldn’t be Canadian,” he murmured, “or you’d have said so right away. It couldn’t be Scotch. Irish?” He lifted an eyebrow, then shook his head. “It’s got to be Australia, that or New Zealand,” he said at last. “It’s just got to be. I don’t think it could be one of those places in Africa. Well, Blondie?”
“You’ve got it. Australia.”
“You don’t say! I came out here by way of Melbourne; d’you know Melbourne? Mightn’t I have met your folks? Who are you, Blondie; ought I to know? I’ve only been here since Monday. Is it all right, your talking to me? Is that guy over there glowering at me, and am I speaking out of turn? I mean–well, but honest, I don’t know any better.”
She giggled. “Nobody’s glowering at you!” She was bewildered by him, he was so bumbling and friendly and shy in spurts.
“Who is that guy, then?”
“I don’t know,” said Jill.
“I thought you were all pals together. You all act like it. Or maybe I just feel that way, being a stranger. Didn’t you ever notice that yourself, Blondie, when you’d just arrived here from Melbourne or Sydney or wherever you told me you came from? Everybody else knows everybody, and you’re all alone?”
Jill was as delighted as the watcher of the skies with his new planet. She began to tell him that she had noticed the phenomenon, most emphatically, but he didn’t wait to hear her. His bursts of shyness did not recur: the floodgates were down. Within the next few minutes she learned that Ray Macklin was a member of the fourth estate, that he didn’t like being called a foreign correspondent–”I’m not dead yet,” he said feelingly, if mysteriously–that he had no idea if he would stay in Shanghai or beetle off to Java within the following week, and that he always liked blondes. Somehow in the same few minutes he gathered from her sundry bits of information about herself, though she was not aware of having been allowed to talk. He had been brought to Kiangwan, he said, by “our local man” and deposited in the pool by his host, who had then gone away, dusting his hands, for a game of golf.
