Miss Jill

by Emily Hahn

  Mrs. Hawkins, a realist, withdrew her complaint. Nothing whatever was done about the hen. Dr. Levy was left in solitary pride, to pick his teeth and contemplate his crime. It was generally agreed that he had done a very unsporting thing, and Jill was greatly shocked.

  She was more shocked when she forced herself to go down to his room and call on him. He greeted her sullenly, and she found it difficult to mention the sore subject of the hen. At last they went out of doors, and there in the path she spoke of it. Dr. Levy seized his head in his hands and rocked it to and fro.

  “That chicken! That damned chicken!” he cried. Jill looked at him in alarm. She had one of the sudden flash backs which so disconcert the prisoner; she remembered Lionel Levy as he had been in the Shanghai era, and then with fresh eyes she saw him as he was. It would have been difficult to realize the two men were one. He had always been neat and well dressed: now he was really shabbier than anyone need be, even in Stanley Camp. He could have kept his hair cut in some fashion or other, Jill said to herself; he could have trimmed his whiskers, which were scanty, uneven, and full of gray hairs. And since his shirt was so ragged and shabby, wouldn’t it have been better to go without? But it wasn’t his clothes that were really responsible for Dr. Lionel’s strange appearance; it was his face. He looked like a man who had given up, like a man looking for an excuse to have hysterics. He reminded her of a horse showing the whites of its eyes as it searches for something to shy at.

  This creature had been Dr. Levy, her confidant and tower of strength. This was the man who had weathered the anti-Semite storms of Europe, the man who was disgusted at nothing, moved by nothing; the man with the wise, ironic smile. It was impossible to believe.

  “You’re not feeling well,” she said, trying to put a warning into her words. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Trouble? What isn’t wrong with this damnable hellhole?” he demanded. “I’m rotting, that’s what it is. In all my life I’ve never been in a fix like this. Don’t talk about Austria to me; in Austria it never lasted as long as this; in Austria there wasn’t this eternal warm rain; in Austria we had something to eat. Something to eat,” shouted Dr. Lionel. Then he moaned again, “That damned chicken.”

  Reassured, Jill started slowly to walk with him. His outburst had relieved him, and at the same time showed her that he was not in such bad case as he pretended. Despair for Dr. Lionel was evidently a sort of refreshment. He was taking a bath in dramatics.

  “But you were running an awful risk with that hen,” she said abruptly.

  Dr. Lionel grinned and began to look more like the Shanghai doctor he had been. “She’s a stubborn woman,” he said, “but she knew she’d met her match.”

  It is a question which of two events that year was the more appalling–the accidental American bombing of a Stanley Camp bungalow and the consequent death of eighteen people, or Dorothy Macklin’s breakdown. Later Jill could not decide. The Macklin affair was closer to her, though, than the bombing. After all, Dorothy lived in the same house as Jill.

  For months, even years, the English girl’s behavior had been one of the chief sources of gossip. After a while it had died down, not so much because she stopped providing material for the saga as that there were no new ears to receive it. Besides, she wasn’t the only woman to be mixed up with the tougher element in the camp. She was one of a small but conspicuous number, and it had long since been accepted that the most scandalous part of her wrongdoing was not that she was promiscuous in her choice of lovers but that she was deeply dyed in the sable tint of the black market.

  Even so, nobody, not the most malicious commentator, not even Jill, could have guessed how deeply sunk Dorothy was until the climax.

  It was midnight. Though Stanley was never really quiet, all activities were at a standstill, in theory, from six in the evening until eight next morning. Each prisoner was to be in his own quarters after six, and no one was to show a light after night fell. At midnight all but the hardiest of the black marketeers were lying huddled in their blankets or their sacking, trying to kill another night.

  Jill woke quickly, as she always did in the camp. She felt someone shaking her arm, and she heard Florence whispering, “Jill, wake up, wake up.”

  She sat up and said, “What? What’s happened?” Like everyone else, she was always expecting a visit from the Japanese, who did most of their surprise arrests by night, and her mind was immediately filled with visions of little men in uniform. “Who are they taking?” she whispered.

  “No, it’s Dorothy Macklin; she’s dying or something. It’s all blood in there; Mrs. Johnson called me, but I can’t do anything if there’s blood. I get sick.”

  Jill ran into the next room. Someone had lit a peanut-oil lamp, shrouding it so that the window would not show it. Dorothy Macklin had one of the coveted camp cots, and she lay on the blood-soaked canvas, tossing and crying hysterically. The other people in the room were all awake; two men sat in the corner on their bedding, looking frightened and angry, and three women were trying to soothe Dorothy. Mrs. Johnson turned to Jill.

  “Oh, look here, Jill, how do you stop this? She’s cut her wrists and I can’t make her lie quiet. Dear, dear, what a mess.…”

  “Let me try,” said Jill. She leaned over and said, “Dot. Dot, stop that noise.”

  Dorothy rolled up her eyes and kicked violently, twisting her face toward the cot. She was very pale, and her mouth was smeared with blood from the blanket. “Let me alone, let me alone, let me alone,” she moaned.

  “Oh, shut up.” Jill’s sharp voice had an effect on her, and she stopped sobbing and lay still, allowing the women to examine the cuts more closely.

  “It’s not too bad,” said Jill after a moment. “I remember a girl in Shanghai who did this. We’ll have to tie it up with cold wet cloth. Who’s got some cloth? Never mind, use her bra for this one; it’s the worst. How’ long has she been this way?”

  “I don’t know,” said another woman. “She called me and there was blood all over the place. She used a piece of glass, I think.”

  “It isn’t too bad,” said Jill, “but you’d better call a doctor.”

  Dorothy kicked again in a recurring spasm. “Let me die,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t die of this,” said Jill roughly. “Not if we left you all night. All right, Mrs. Johnson, I think that’ll hold her now. Why don’t you all try to get back to sleep?”

  After the doctor had paid a hurried, surreptitious visit, Jill sat down on the floor near Dorothy’s head and began to stroke her hair rhythmically, saying softly, “It’s all right now. Don’t worry.”

  “But what’s going to happen?” demanded Dorothy. “What will they do to me?” She began to cry again, but without excitement. She cried in a soft sort of despair. “He’ll tell, I know he will; he said today that he’d go up the hill and give them my name.”

  “Who’ll tell what?”

  “Cheng,” said Dorothy. Cheng was one of the guards, a large grinning fellow with a gold tooth who was known to be useful in the black market game. “He gave me three thousand yen,” said Dorothy. “It was about a month ago.”

  “Gave it to you?”

  “Oh yes; anyway, I thought he’d forget it, though it was a loan. I thought he liked me and wouldn’t want it back.” She sobbed. “I can’t pay him and now he wants the money; he’s peeved at me. Well, I don’t care, I don’t care about anything; if he thinks I’m going to sneak out there to the fence any old time he feels like calling me … He’s a brute. Now he says he’ll tell the Japanese. Oh, I want to die.”

  “Shhhhh,” said Jill. “How can he tell them without getting himself in trouble?”

  “He can make up some lie. You know he can.”

  “Yes, and so can you. Don’t you worry. We’ll manage. I’ll talk to Cheng if it’s necessary. You go to sleep.”

  “I feel better now,” said Dorothy. She sobbed and sniffled. “If–only––Oh, will we ever get out of this rat hole? What’s to become
of us, Jill?”

  Jill shrugged.

  “Where did you live before?” asked Dorothy drowsily. “I didn’t know you, did I? Were you around here before the war?”

  “Yes, I was around.”

  After another minute Dorothy was asleep.

  “I guess it was a cigarette deal that fell through. She must have thought she’d make some money; she couldn’t possibly have thought he’d let three thousand yen go glimmering,” said Jill. “Nobody could be that stupid, surely.”

  “But if she slept with him … Ugh!” Florence shuddered. “I really feel sick, Jill. And a white girl at that. They say she comes of good family.”

  Elaborately Jill yawned.

  “You look awfully bright-eyed,” said Florence resentfully. “Full of beans. Nobody would think you’d been up all night.”

  Jill ignored her. “She may be well-bred,” she said, following her thoughts, “but she needs a lot of training, all the same.

  After all, a girl who can’t even manage a Formosan guard––”

  “Jill!”

  “—can’t be expected to cut her wrists properly, I was going to say. Why, what’s the matter, Flo?”

  Florence had covered her face with her hands. “It just comes over me sometimes,” she said, “this terrible trap; it brings out such horrible things in everybody. Whatever will we be like when we come out of it, if ever we do? We get rottener and rottener.”

  Jill did not answer immediately. She stood looking out at the early-morning sea, her eyes still unnaturally bright.

  “I’m not afraid of being rescued,” she said. “Lots of things have been settled now. I’m ready.”

  Florence was still crouched on the floor, her head in her hands.

  “Poor Dorothy,” said Jill, as if to herself. “Do you know, I really am sorry for her. I mean that. It’s a tough game for amateurs.”

  XXI

  Alumni of Stanley Camp will all remember 1945 as the year they began to run down, finally, like clocks that have not been wound. Most of them slept a good deal, and what weak emotion they felt was of an unpleasant kind. People who had been plodding along side by side for months would suddenly rise up like enraged fowl against each other, shrieking and ruffling their feathers, but after a few halfhearted blows they would sink into lassitude. A good loud fight usually meant that two new cases entered the hospital. Hospital gave one a modicum of better food, a teaspoonful extra of life, and then the patient was sent back to his ordinary diet. People who collapsed in the gardens, people who couldn’t get up in the morning became commonplaces.

  Two women had occupied one tiny room since the beginning of the camp, and though they both complained loudly of the discomfort of sleeping double on floor space barely sufficient for one, they got along well enough. Usually they slept lying with their heads in opposite directions; it seemed to make things easier like that. One night after three years of comparatively amicable existence, something happened. Afterward it was remembered that Lucy had been snappish for some time, declaring that Gwen was not staying on her side of the boundary line.

  “Take your bottom out of my face!” Lucy had snarled several times in a week of nights.

  That night there was squawking and screaming from the girls’ room. Gwen was crying when the rest of the house arrived to investigate. Lucy, she declared shrilly, had bitten her in the bottom. Lucy had, too; it was a deep and painful wound.… They were both promptly taken to hospital.

  After March the air raids stopped for a while. In June, when Hong Kong summer was at its height, a new rumor swept the camp, a rumor of wholesale terror, of a scope which the prisoners had not known since the long-ago days of the surrender. A Formosan guard confided it to one of the black market men. The war was going badly for the Japanese and could not be carried on much longer. They were laying plans for a secret, orderly retreat from Hong Kong. That was all very well, and a cause for rejoicing in general, but the Japanese had no intention of taking any risks with their European prisoners. They were going to kill them first.

  It was probably a cock-and-bull story, said the black market man; he advised his confidants to pay no attention to it. One could never believe the guards, even though they trusted in their own stories; they would come up with a new one in the next few days, no doubt.

  They did, but it was not a contradiction of the other; it was merely an addition. The military had now decided the knottiest problem of all, i.e., how best to carry out this mass execution. It had been resolved to march the prisoners out in batches to the beach, walking like Noah’s animals, two by two, and there to shoot them down. The friendly Formosan wanted his particular black market chum to keep this development a secret, making plans only for his own escape and, of course, for those of his wife and children. If the Englishman could find a good hiding place on the way to the beach, that might be best, the Formosan said. After the massacre the Japanese would go away and then it would be all right.

  No doubt the report was truthful for that time. A thousand frantic plans must have been formed and discarded by the Japanese in those anxious months, and in the last shuffle the execution of Stanley Camp was forgotten by everyone but the prisoners themselves. They would have been more upset if they had been better fed. As it was, they fulminated and tried to make plans for themselves, and failed, and decided to hope for the best, and slipped back into apathy.

  It was in August that a new, more concrete terror overtook them. One day the Japanese military gave the order and rounded up all the men they classed as “technical experts.” It was generally understood that they were to be taken to Canton to be held as hostages. Nobody knew why technicians should be better hostages than anyone else, but Japanese logic is not always clear. There were tears and a few subdued hysterics as people said good-by forever, and the men and their families were marched out of the camp. Even so, they were envied. Canton would be a change.

  Almost immediately after that the news came in. It was the end; Japan had surrendered.

  Jill could not have told how they first learned about it. There was no formal announcement; the camp was like a boat that suddenly began to leak in twenty places at once. No doubt the guards began it, and a few significant incidents confirmed it, but all Jill could say afterward was that Florence came running into the room where the others were trying to wash clothes, scrape fuel together, and put their scraps away. “Jill,” she said, “it’s the end. Japan’s given in.”

  Jill jumped up more quickly than she had moved for weeks. “What? Are you sure? How do you know?”

  “Everybody knows. Come on!”

  They ran out of doors, meeting others, exchanging glances. No one dared as yet make any loud sign of rejoicing, partly for fear of the Japanese, but more because they feared themselves to believe it. There were little meetings, excited talk, quick commands to hush it up. Nothing was settled; nothing more happened that day. Yet this time it sounded real; there was something in the air, something of great anguish and joy, enough to keep most people awake a good part of the night.

  “I do think it’s true,” said Florence. “For a long time there’s been a tired feeling about the war.”

  “Not the war necessarily,” said Yulia. “Just us.”

  In the morning the prisoners, quietly standing about on the ground they knew so well, turned to look at the British prison building where the Japanese were quartered. Something out of the ordinary routine was going on up there. They looked and made guesses and looked again. There could be no doubt about it; they had seen the same thing when their own government surrendered.…

  “Whoops! They’re burning papers! It must be over!”

  But the food that day was the same as always. Nobody could swear to any one fact that might have meant the end.

  It all happened at once, in a rush. One minute they were scattered among their houses, killing time, surrounded by the same old guards and officers; the next minute the planes came. Came swooping with joyful buzz over the camp, round and round, low
er and lower, the machines themselves looking excited as they hovered above those wild, cheering hundreds, Lower and lower they came.

  “Look out!” shouted someone. “They’re dropping things!”

  They were indeed dropping things–trunks drifting down under their miniature parachutes, down to the ground, to the housetops, to fluttering open hands. Cheers and sobs and shouts and laughter greeted each one. After all the months of regimentation, nobody grabbed. The trunks were taken to the central office to be fairly distributed.

  Yet at the same time the camp went mad. There was a riot of eating, dancing, howling, crying for joy. The planes would come in, drop their parachute presents, circle in a sort of final congratulation, and fly away. It could not be a dream because it went on for a long, long time.

  When the sky was clear and quiet somebody noticed that the Japanese had gone. Vanished, without so much as a bugle note. Evaporated.

  Jill climbed up the hillside to watch the fleet come in. Flo had run down to the beach where most of the other prisoners had congregated, yearning over the ripples at their feet as if the few hundred yards they had come to give welcome to the Navy could shorten the weary waiting of the past four years. For once Jill had not wanted to be a part of the crowd; she wanted to be high up, to see better than the others.

  Along the beach below her, between bursts of cheering, the mass of people was silent. No doubt most of them were thinking as she was, wondering with new energy what was to come next. There had been time to be drunk with happiness, plenty of time, and then there had been another week in which to sober down.

  It was over, the whole long bad dream. Each prisoner down there with his toes in the rippling ocean had been spending the last few days climbing out of his own particular hibernation hole. Four years is a long time, but it is not an appreciable proportion of a life, and of all that crowd which had become a homogeneous mass after a few months of prison, very few were not longing to go back into their old private shells. Several men and women had dug deep into boxes and brought out whole garments, trousers, jackets, and dresses, in which they suddenly looked respectable; even, to the innocent eyes of Stanley, modish. The others, though still in their grime and flapping rags, had found within their souls a sort of prewar garment. Separate individuals again, they all, tradesmen and diplomats and policemen and teachers and workers, spent the remaining days of captivity wallowing in the long-forgotten mentalities of freedom.