Miss Jill

by Emily Hahn

  Over on the other side of the island where their homes had been, the city of Hong Kong, too, was stagnant. The Colony lay in the grip of conquerors who had ceased to be jubilant, for the war was turning against them, and the more thoughtful of the Japanese officers were trying to face facts for themselves as well as prevent the public from knowing them. Tempers among the rulers were short, and it went badly with civilians who were caught in their search for unorthodox information. The Chinese lived on rumor and fortunetelling. The truth was not enough, even when it was favorable; one genuine report of an American naval victory in the Pacific was always followed up with a wild tale of imminent deliverance.

  Stanley Camp, walled off as it was from the rest of the world, was still shaken and swayed by these waves of excitement. For a time there was a secret source of news; some of the men rigged up a radio receiving set. But Stanley was too big a community to get away with that; there were too many informers mixed up in the crowd for safety. One day suddenly a number of people were arrested and taken away, and later it was known that some of them had been executed. It was the first incident of the kind, and the last to take place in Stanley Camp. The people sank back into the old bored ignorance, cowed and quiet. Better to stagnate, they felt, than to pay such a price for stimulation.

  As for Jill, sooner than most of the others she accepted the dull vegetation. She watched, unmoved by sympathy, when Florence sometimes had a storm of impatient weeping. Florence longed for the past or the future, for her husband in a Japanese military camp, for her old home in Yorkshire, for anything, everything, something, to happen. She, Jill, had no particular longing for the past and nothing but uncertain expectations of the future. Still she did try to comfort Florence. “Everything comes to an end someday, you know,” she said.

  “But when, when? If only we had a hint!”

  “It’s all planned,” said Jill with assurance.

  “It’s so awful not knowing anything.”

  “Is it?” said Jill. “I don’t think so. When we used to get the wireless news it upset me terribly. I couldn’t sleep, and then when we didn’t hear anything for a few days it was much worse than ever before. Like that one time the planes came over. We waited and waited for them to come again, but they never did, and that was worse, I think, than if they’d never come at all.”

  Most of the time nobody talked about the situation in general. As if they agreed with Jill, they tried instead to fill the days with little conversations and little tasks–watering the gardens if water could be had, finding material to mend their rags of clothing, helping out the parents whose small children needed attention and things. They gossiped a good deal. There was plenty of material for scandal, and in time one became used to the more ordinary forms of it, for such affairs as took place were necessarily blatantly public.

  Jill looked on, wide-eyed and sometimes amused, at the behavior of these conventional pillars of civilization. There were ordinary flirtations and adulteries, the sort which had gone on before the war among the Europeans she had never known, and these were the bits of gossip which pleased her most. The other sort of scandal, which her new friends observed with the same titillated horror, did not interest her at all. Among the young men who were interned, many of them policemen who had not been counted as military men, some had brought Chinese wives or mistresses into camp with them. The Japanese made no distinction between common-law wives and the legal sort, and there were considerable numbers of these non-European girls in the camp. Probably because most of them had been picked up by the men in dance halls or brothels, their standards of conduct were easier than those of the English. At any rate, they made no pretense of chastity from the beginning, though the English did-at the beginning. Besides, they were Asiatics, and the Japanese and Indian guards, and the Formosans who were put on the job later, were often ready and willing to make friends with them. It was through such contacts that the black market flourished, running like a secret swelling river across the barbed-wire border and up from the rooms of the police, higher and higher in the camp aristocracy, until it trickled into almost every dwelling place in Stanley. Under its influence the aristocracy altered. A Chinese woman, Mrs. Hawkins, became queen of the market. Brokers who had sold the gold fillings in their teeth, girls who wanted to exchange lockets for cigarettes, race-horse owners with good clothes to swap, all became very friendly with Mrs. Hawkins.

  “My word,” said Jill to Lionel Levy, “if only I’d known in the old days what I know now!”

  “Why, what is it that surprises you?” asked the doctor. They were walking on the beach in the sunlight. It was a lovely day, but Dr. Lionel looked ill and bad-tempered.

  “The way these high-class people behave!” said Jill. “I knew about the men, of course, but I never knew before that the women were the same.”

  “It is foolish to make distinctions. Nature is nature,” said the doctor. “You observe I do not qualify it by the term ‘human.’ I shall never again, myself, slip into the error of that distinction. Most doctors know, of course, how slight it is, that difference between human and other sorts of life.”

  This sounded like heresy. Jill was sure Father Sullivan would not have approved, and she was silent. Then, remembering the original topic, she giggled. “Florence was so funny last night,” she said. “She was walking along the hillside alone, and coming past a bush, she tripped over something–a foot, it was. She landed bang on top of two people in the bush. They were right in the middle of it. And Florence, who has nice manners, just said, ‘Oh, excuse me,’ and went on with her walk. She didn’t even start to laugh at it herself until she got home. It never occurred to her one way or the other.”

  “Nothing funny in that,” said Dr. Lionel, but he, too, laughed.

  “Some people are using the cemetery,” said Jill. “Not the Chinese; they’re too superstitious. But they do say a freshly dug grave is one of the most private places you can find.”

  “A fine and private place,” agreed Dr. Lionel.

  The first American air raid, though it disturbed Jill’s carefully cultivated serenity, was well worth it. Afterward the usual flood of rumor had not time to die down into familiar stagnation before the next one started it all up again. From that time on life was punctuated with raids and distant explosions from the ocean, until there came a time when no prisoner could remember the endless days of hopeless quiet.

  Yet it was as if no community could stay together in one simple emotion for more than a few days. Planes or no planes, the old pastimes were resumed–gardening, scrounging, gossiping, black-marketing.

  “There’ll be a day of reckoning,” said Florence one morning, “and it’s surprising how some people seem to forget that. Take Dorothy Macklin. The little idiot.”

  “Why? What’s she doing now?” Jill pricked up her ears. Her morbid obsession with Dorothy had waned with her energy.

  “Nothing I’d swear to in court.” Florence refused to say more, but Jill found out from other more willing scandalmongers. Dorothy had run through a series of affairs, choosing her lovers with an eye to gain and ease. She was now involved, evidently, with a man high in the black market queen’s confidence–”Someone I never heard of before the war, my dear,” said the dressmaker who told Jill about it, “an importer of cosmetics or something”–and she herself was an active worker in the smuggling cause.

  It was funny, Jill thought, how angry they all were with people in that game, and yet nobody could do without them. If it hadn’t been for the market and the marketeers, a lot of prisoners would have been much weaker than they were. Yet nobody loved the merchants. There would be a great freeze after the war, she decided, unless in the rapture of victory everyone agreed to kiss and forget.

  She looked around the littered room which she knew so well. It was a nice day and she would be happier outside. She could walk over to the school to see if she might help. It would be something to do, and she could forget the grinding of her stomach and the pins and needles she was begi
nning to feel in her feet. But it was too much trouble.

  If she were only in love the time would pass more quickly, perhaps, but she could not think of any Stanley man with enough interest to start anything. Besides, love affairs were really not worth it. Father Sullivan didn’t like them–he had been severe about the only time she did lapse from grace, and that proved to be a disappointing, uncomfortable business anyway, with one of the government cadets who was far too young to make sense. Supposing, as Father Sullivan had said, supposing she were to be struck by a piece of bomb after a performance like that!

  “But I’m not the only one, Father. Even the women who’ve always been such respectable––”

  He had cut short her whine without ceremony or mercy. After all, one could scarcely be surprised, she admitted to herself; sex indulgence was certainly the one sin a priest would never understand or forgive.

  Anyway, it had been a disappointment. “It always is,” said Jill to herself. “I’ve had enough of all that, after all.… And Father’s right, think of the risk I took!”

  On second thought she decided it was not too much trouble, after all, to go out and do something constructive. Service was the thing, Father Sullivan had reminded her.

  The sound of planes halted Jill on the doorstep. In the distance bombs were falling. All around in the sleepy, weakened village there came a sort of bristling, carefully silent for fear of the watching guards, but noticeable nevertheless. It was like an electric shock. In every heart there was a leap, a hope, a longing, as well as terror.

  They had not yet learned to be afraid of anything specific; no bomb had yet hit Stanley Camp. They stood where they were, like Jill, lifting their thin faces to the sky. After a long sleep life reached upward once again.

  That was in 1943.

  XX

  Nineteen forty-four was marked by something which shocked Jill very badly. It concerned Dr. Lionel Levy, and that was why she felt it. Nobody else’s decline and fall had much effect on her. She glided through the days as if they were all made of one piece–people, guards, weather, decreasing food–a piece of ice, perhaps, or of glass over which she slid without pain or pleasure.

  She had fallen into a habit of saying to herself, “The days go by, the days go by,” like an incantation. At the beginning she had done it as an act of faith, reminding herself that somewhere all of this pointed toward an end. When the waiting was torture, that thought alone was comforting. Never mind what the end might be, she felt; it might be worse than the present, with her full concurrence, so long as it came. Someday it was bound to come. There was no eternity in this life, at least. The days went by, the days went by–she hugged this comfort to her heart. Even in 1944 there were times when the words still had power to soothe her by their meaning instead of simply as an incantation. With each day, after all, the sum of things past was bigger, and that of things to come smaller.

  There had been one or two experiences, like bumps on the ice–a quarrel with Florence that blew up out of nowhere and in the end drifted away into nowhere, leaving them as good friends as ever, and a strangely intense love affair between herself and the four-year-old boy who lived in the next room. Every morning he was waiting for her. He walked about the camp with her and tried to help her with her sweeping; he hung about at teatime, knowing she would manage somehow to give him a bite of something extra; he even tried to find presents for her, bits of wood for fuel or old vegetables.

  There had been other excitements, chief of which were the arrivals at infrequent intervals of parcels from the city, with tins of food and a few pieces of clothing. Andy had arranged for those, Andy, who early in the occupation went away to Shanghai where his property needed protection. A Chinese clerk in his office was told to take care of Jill, and she felt fonder of Andy than ever she had expected to feel, on the days when the parcels arrived. He had changed in her memory; he had become a figure of kindliness, but he was wrapped in mystery, like a legend.

  Not so Dr. Lionel Levy, the old friend who had so strangely accompanied her to the outermost edges of experience.

  The trouble began and ended, as it always did in Stanley, over food. Mrs. Hawkins, the Chinese lady who ran the black market, was a thrifty Cantonese. It was obvious that she intended to make a good thing out of her stay in the camp; otherwise she could easily arrange to leave, as Asiatics were not forced to accept imprisonment. She need merely declare her intention of divorcing Hawkins, and the gates would be open to her. But Mrs. Hawkins was a shrewd person who knew how to shape her destiny, and she had no intention of joining the hurly-burly of Hong Kong’s starving thousands outside the barbed wire. Not as long as she could live in comfort, protected by the enemy, and lay up goods for the future of herself and her family.

  Little by little Mrs. Hawkins became overconfident. As the years passed she grew so used to taking squeeze out of every bargain that she chaperoned, every sack of eggs and sugar and every lot of tins, and so accustomed to paying the guards what they insisted on, that she came to look upon her trade as a legitimate one. After all, it was hallowed by time and custom, the strongest forces of her fatherland’s civilization. She forgot that times change, especially in war. The Japanese decided to reform their method of policing Stanley. As the days went by, doggedly marked by Jill, the Japs who ruled the community had become as impersonal in the eyes of the prisoners as so many clouds in the sky. They were there, and the prisoners knew them; oh, they knew them far too well. Every idiosyncrasy of theirs was known to the prisoners. But like all fixed planets, they lost their novelty. It was whispered among the British that Yamashita and the others were not important people in the Japanese setup; they were civilians in spite of their uniforms and were subject in every respect to the military caste. It was no use to appeal to them for big things, like an increase in the ration or permission to cook at home. In time, therefore, the Stanley Camp people stopped noticing the authorities on the hill. The guards, however, were a different thing. They were at once more dangerous and more helpful.

  One day the guards were changed, and a group of large, hairy, grinning Formosans took the place of the Japanese and Indians to whom the prisoners had become accustomed. Mrs. Hawkins was not unduly worried; she had lived and prospered through other similar changes. It was merely a matter of making new contacts and of directing her underlings such as Dorothy Macklin to do likewise. One had to go slowly and carefully, that was all. In the meantime she settled back, remaining comfortable and cozy in her adaptable way. She had begun to raise vegetables near her quarters, and she had a few chickens too.

  During a preliminary conversation with the leader of the new guards one night she ran into a bit of trouble. These Formosans were rapacious people, and in three years they had got over the first simplicity that characterizes most occupying forces. The chief wanted a higher rate of squeeze than she had been used to paying his predecessor. Mrs. Hawkins was astonished and angry and lost her temper. Before she could realize what had happened the Formosan lost his as well and flung himself off and reported her to the men on the hill. Mrs. Hawkins was arrested, flogged, and sentenced to a prison term. It was not a long term, for the Japanese are comparatively easy on women. They seem to think that Nature made women weak and imperfect to begin with, and one cannot quarrel with Nature. They were remarkably easy on Mrs. Hawkins, considering the punishments they usually dealt out. Not only was she flogged but once, but they allowed her to come home, though under guard, to arrange her affairs before being incarcerated. That was where Dr. Lionel Levy came in.

  He lived not far from Mrs. Hawkins and they were friends, so it was to him that she entrusted her favorite hen. “My husband can take care of the others,” she said, “but you look after her.”

  That was what Mrs. Hawkins said she had said later on. Dr. Lionel had a different story; he maintained stoutly that she had bequeathed him the hen. It was a gift outright, said Dr. Levy.

  Anyway, he did take care of the bird, and Mrs. Hawkins went to jail and probably managed
to eat quite well while she was there. In due course she came out again and started arranging her affairs afresh. She interviewed her agents, she saw the Formosan captain of the guard and graciously accepted his apologies, and she demanded her hen of Dr. Levy.

  “But she’s my hen now,” said Dr. Levy. “You gave her to me. I’ve been feeding her all this time at great trouble and expense. She is mine, not yours.”

  Mrs. Hawkins was furiously indignant. “I did no such thing. You have had the use of her all this time; you have had her eggs. That’s enough for anybody. Give her back to me.”

  “Then give me what I paid to keep her,” said Dr. Lionel.

  The quarrel continued but got no further. At last Mrs. Hawkins went to law, or to the only equivalent that could be had in Stanley Camp. This was known as the Tribunal, and as the Japanese jealously guarded their rights as sole dispensers of punishment, the penalties imposed by the Tribunal were of a moral rather than a material nature. When the judges declared that so-and-so must do something or else, so-and-so might have defied their commands with impunity. Somehow, though, few people defied those judges. They had been in camp a long time and would have said they had given over hoping for release, but they had not. Somewhere in every mind was the spark of hope; everyone knew that there would be, as Florence said, a day of reckoning.

  Apprised by the Tribunal that the case of the Hawkins hen was to come up before them at the next meeting, Dr. Levy must have had a sort of brainstorm. Without waiting for judgment, he killed the hen and ate it.

  There wasn’t much the Tribunal could do after that. The value of a hen, an egg-laying hen, was incalculable. An order to him to pay damages to Mrs. Hawkins was out of the question, since no one was supposed to have any money; besides, what if he refused? What then? Short of appealing to the Japs for backing, a thing impossible to conceive, the Tribunal could do nothing against an obstinate character, and Dr. Levy was behaving very much indeed like one.