by Emily Hahn
Now as they jostled one another on the beach they exchanged half-embarrassed glances. They knew too much about each other. They were trying earnestly and with success to forget it. They were retreating from the old stamping ground; their steps were slow and desperately dignified as they walked backward.
“So sorry,” one would murmur courteously to another after stepping on his foot.
Alone on the hillside, Jill looked down on their heads and shoulders, saying good-by. There was Dorothy Macklin’s yellow head close to the graying one of her latest conquest, a government cadet. It was a very recent romance, and Dorothy was so much obsessed with it that she sometimes failed to see Jill at all when they met in their house corridor. When she did become aware of her neighbor, however, she was cordial. Jill had managed successfully to bully Cheng.… “I swear I’ll never forget you,” Dorothy had said ecstatically, throwing her bandaged arms around Jill’s neck.
It seemed very likely now that she would break that vow. Jill knew that she no longer cared whether or not Dorothy remembered. She had talked it over with Father Sullivan the day before. She had been looking into her heart as he told her to, and Dorothy had not been one of her chief worries.
Was that Dr. Lionel Levy over there at the edge of the crowd? Yes, it was. How like him to be lingering like that on the fringes. No doubt he had resolved not to go down to the beach or to watch for the fleet at all, and then at the last minute he was tempted beyond his desire to remain aloof. There he stood, looking careless and a little contemptuous of all the excitement; nevertheless, there he stood, watching as the others did, straining his eyes out to sea.
The beautiful ships lifted into the air as they crept up, closer and closer, rising against the sky with a slow, deliberate certainty, a lovely insolence. Jill caught her breath.
It was hard to believe they were not bringing something with them, something besides the airy, empty promise of liberty. “When my ship comes in,” whispered Jill. Her heart lifted like the prow of the leading ship, and she remembered with some shame her confession to Father Sullivan. She had complained and whined to him.
“Father, I’m afraid of the end,” she had said. “I don’t want to start out all over again. I’ve felt safe here and warm and cozy for the first time in my life. Yes, even when I was hungriest.”
Father Sullivan had said that young people should not cling to prison, even young people like herself.
“But life is such a jungle for me! I’m going back into the jungle, and here I was safe––”
“In a zoo,” the priest had said. He scolded her for being cowardly. If she wanted to be safe forever, he said, she must earn her security, and the path had yet to be followed. “You have been spared for some purpose. There is a lot for you to do before the end, and you will be happy while you’re doing it. Who knows, perhaps this was meant as a sort of training for you. Don’t you feel as if you had learned something here? Aren’t you stronger?”
“Oh yes, I am,” said Jill. “I’m much stronger, thanks to you. But––”
“Thanks to your Church,” said Father Sullivan quickly.
“—but not strong enough,” said Jill, ignoring the correction. “Already I’m beginning to lean toward evil, Father. When we all get out, what’s going to happen to me? What am I going to do? I know I’ll be free to choose, but suppose I meet someone, oh, somebody out of one of the ships perhaps … Have I really changed at all, or was it just the camp that made me feel different? Am I going to forget all this, and you, and the way we’ve talked?”
“No,” said Father Sullivan.
“And I wonder, too, about myself, silly thoughts like worrying over my hair going gray, and whether I’ll ever have smart clothes again. I’d do anything to get a pretty outfit, Father–well, almost anything. That’s the way I feel sometimes. It was better before the surrender. Now my mind feels too crowded. I’m afraid.”
He had reassured her as best he could. “Everyone is upset just now,” he had said. “Great happiness is very much like great grief, and this camp is full of troubled souls. It’s not only you.”
Now, watching the ships in their stately advance, the last words came back to her with a vivid force that was greater than Father Sullivan’s. She looked down again at the waiting, jostling prisoners, and as she looked they all fell silent, too, gazing like children at the swelling ships coming so near, bringing such change, such an end, such a beginning. In the silence Jill understood each one of them and recognized their hearts as replicas of her own.
A scrap of a poem floated into her mind out of nowhere, for no particular reason, a poem she must have read in the camp library.
There are roses to kiss, and mouths to kiss, and the sharp-pained shadow of death.
It seemed somehow like an answer, and her mind, satisfied, stopped asking its restless questions. Everything, she realized, at that moment seemed like an answer—the blue sky, the little waves near the sand, and the massive benevolence of those ships, now so very close, carrying with them the end and the beginning.
The poem and the sky’s air and the ocean’s water and the ships between air and water sang together, answering her fretful questions once and for all. It was for a purpose that she had come to prison; it was to hear that song.
“Not only you,” sang the ships.
About the Author
Emily Hahn (1905–1997) was the author of fifty two books, as well as 181 articles and short stories for the New Yorker from 1929 to 1996. She was a staff writer for the magazine for forty seven years. She wrote novels, short stories, personal essays, reportage, poetry, history and biography, natural history and zoology, cookbooks, humor, travel, children’s books, and four autobiographical narratives: China to Me (1944), a literary exploration of her trip to China; Hong Kong Holiday (1946); England to Me (1949); and Kissing Cousins (1958).
The fifth of six children, Hahn was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and later became the first woman to earn a degree in mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin. She did graduate work at both Columbia and Oxford before leaving for Shanghai. She lived in China for eight years. Her wartime affair with Charles Boxer, Britain’s chief spy in pre–World War II Hong Kong, evolved into a loving and unconventional marriage that lasted fifty two years and produced two daughters. Hahn’s final piece in the New Yorker appeared in 1996, shortly before her death.
A revolutionary for her time, Hahn broke many of the rules of the 1920s, traveling the country dressed as a boy, working for the Red Cross in Belgium, becoming the concubine to a Shanghai poet, using opium, and having a child out of wedlock. She fought against the stereotype of female docility that characterized the Victorian era and was an advocate for the environment until her death.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1947 by Emily Hahn Boxer
Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media
ISBN 978-1-4976-1941-8
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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