Miss Jill

A Novel

Emily Hahn

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781497619418
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Fiction
• Index: Literature

A novel about an enterprising Shanghai streetwalker from the "American literary treasure" and author of the memoir China to Me ( The New Yorker ). Meet Miss Jill, a young woman pursuing the oldest profession in prewar Shanghai. Fifteen, blonde, and full of personality, Jill begins her career as a Japanese banker's mistress. Soon after, she becomes a European prostitute in the house of Annette, and believes that any day now she'll be married to a nobleman. But none of her adventures prepare Miss Jill for the war and her subsequent internment. An early feminist and an American journalist who traveled to the Belgian Congo and China in the 1930s, Emily Hahn wrote more than fifty books, both fiction and nonfiction; this is Hahn at her touching and entertaining best, portraying an exotic place in a dramatic time with great authenticity and empathy.

I

Jill spent a large part of her time talking about her past and spoke very little of her future. This was one of the disadvantages of her trade, for a prostitute, if she is clever, allows her client to direct the conversation, and what man discusses the future with a woman he hopes to pay off in the morning?

Moreover, and it is a more amiable prompting, with certain people outside one’s own ordinary circle–explorers, inventors, labor leaders, whores–one asks them, if merely as a matter of curiosity, “How did it happen? Why aren’t you doing as I do, and as my neighbor on the left and my neighbor on the right are doing? How do you happen to be living in this precarious fashion instead of being safe and dull like me and all my family?”

Over and over Jill had told the story about being a simple convent girl and the other one about the wicked employer, and she was tired of the whole thing. There was a slow anger burning away in her mind. The danger was imminent. If something didn’t happen soon to relieve her Jill would deal a smashing blow and start to tell the truth. She would indulge herself. She would have one of her nervous breakdowns.

At the same time a warning memory helped her to control the impulse. No doubt Annette would be angry, and unless Jill could work herself into a veritable inspiration of hysterics Annette was a power to be feared. Large and lethargic, she was still very watchful of her affairs. She inspected every room of the big rambling house every single day of the week; there wasn’t another European housewife in Shanghai as scrupulously clean as Annette, the madame of the brothel in Tibet Road. Careful to a lesser degree of the girls’ own lives, she still kept a sharp eye on them. She couldn’t do much about the ones who lived outside, but those who stayed night and day within the walls were as well cared for, according to her lights, as girls in a school. Of course Annette’s standards were not those of a schoolmistress, but she had her principles. And nothing made her so angry as any accusation that she did not do what she considered her duty. Annette aroused was a tiger, or perhaps a tiger tamer would be a better description.

“Interesting, very interesting,” as Dr. Lionel Levy said to Jill.

It was a Thursday, and rather a slow night at Annette’s. Dr. Lionel had dropped in then for that reason. A Saturday would have been different; the Europeans had set the fashion for that one night in the week as a special occasion, and the Asiatics followed their lead in this as in other matters. Dr. Lionel was fastidious enough to avoid a crowd, and perhaps it was not only fastidiousness that made him pick out the deserted early hours of a midweek night to pay a call on Jill. He had his way to make in the world. In the minds of the public a rising doctor ought not frivol his time and money at Annette’s. A doctor partook of some of the advantages and many disadvantages of the priesthood.

No one was in the large drawing room when he arrived and asked for Jill. Tony, who answered the door, was alone on duty at this hour; nobody had ever been to Annette’s at any time when Tony was not there, no matter what other lesser domestics came and went. He recognized Dr. Lionel; he greeted him by name.

“Yes, Jill’s here,” he said, and padded off softly to call her.

Left alone, Dr. Lionel wrinkled his nose with distaste and sat down gingerly on an overstuffed sofa. It was a purely mechanical distaste, an irrational feeling, left over from his youthful years in Europe, that in these heavy velvet drapes and soft chairs lurked a dust of more than normal dirtiness. He did not really think so, but still from the past he had an impression that this air held a miasma which did not exist in ordinary hotel atmosphere. Recognizing this weakness in himself, he smiled tolerantly. Dr. Lionel had learned to be tolerant, even with himself. He was tolerance itself with Annette’s girls. Yet he neglected to stand up when Jill came into the room: convention is a terribly strong force.

“Oh, so you did come!”

Perhaps she really was pleased, as well as surprised, that he had remembered.

“Did you think I was too drunk to know what I was saying?”

“Oh––” She giggled a little. “No, not exactly.…”

“I suppose it’s too early to ask you to drink here,” said Dr. Lionel. “Shall we go out somewhere? To the Park, or what would you like? I’ll get you back before dinner,” he added as she hesitated. “We can’t talk here, it’s impossible. When must you start work?”

“Annette likes us to be in before eight. All right, I’ll get my hat; just a minute while I tell Tony.…”

A soft noise like far-off thunder shook the air as they rode down the street toward the center of the city. Involuntarily Jill looked over her shoulder toward the creek that bounded the International Settlement.

“No,” said the doctor, “they are away off by now, halfway to Nanking.”

“Oh dear–do you think they’ll get there?”

He shrugged.

“The Chinese put up a good fight,” said Jill.

“You sound as if you were there yourself,” he said, amused. “Quite authoritative.”

“Well, we ought to know enough about it at Annette’s. The Japanese are coming in now to see us, you know.”

“So?”

“Oh yes, colonels and generals and I don’t know what.”

“You do not mind?”

“Some of the girls aren’t crazy about it,” said Jill.

“But you yourself?”

She was evasive.

The Park Hotel was at its urban best at cocktail time. No hotel in Shanghai struck such a satisfactory medium between the uncomfortable splendors of old-fashioned British grandeur and the more hygienic if less gracious virtues of 1937. It was a place for the younger element of all races. While the wealthy older generation of Europeans clung to the Cathay down on the Bund, moved by the unspoken feeling that the Cathay, owned and operated by whites, must be better, the young Frenchmen and Chinese and Indians and Americans and Germans and Britons with money went cheerfully to the Chinese-owned Park, up in Bubbling Well Road, to meet their girl friends and drink their drinks. The suites at the Park, with their wide-open view of the racecourse, were much in demand. The central heating was so efficient as to be oppressive, and in chilly Shanghai it was chic to be overheated that year.

In Lionel’s lifetime he had learned to mistrust all emotions save amusement. Other emotions would intrude, but the doctor, trying to exorcise them as illusion, greeted them all with his tired laughter. As a result his face was divided into halves, like those of so many intelligents; crow’s-feet and a wrinkled brow gave his eyes a look of kindly hilarity which his mouth would not agree to. His actual smile was restrained. When he smiled Jill thought he was sneering, and to some extent she was right. As they entered the plushy lounge and sat down at a chromium table she glanced at him. Her fleeting look was childish and imploring, but Dr. Lionel recognized practice and emptiness in both qualities.

“You like to come here?” he suggested.

“Oh yes, thank you!”

A little more extreme, he thought, and she would have clapped her hands in subnormal glee. She almost lisped.

“Why?”

“Oh–it’s pretty.… I like to see people.…”

“And to be seen,” hinted Dr. Lionel. That drew a satisfactory reaction; she flashed indignantly, with no trace of baby talk:

“Why? There isn’t anybody here I’d want to know.”

“There, there, I only meant it must be nice to get a change. Annette’s is not so gay in the daytime, is it?”

“Oh, it’s all right,” said Jill. Their drinks arrived and she attacked hers. She laughed, back in her child world again. “We all sleep late, you know. I like coming out and watching people, new people just going through Shanghai; I love going to Yates Road and talking to the tourists, sometimes, in the shops.”

“Do you go alone?”

She was accustomed to the catechism. Men liked to ask all sorts of questions; at least the men she preferred did.

“Sometimes; sometimes Nina goes with me. I like Nina best to go out with. She doesn’t look so–well, you know. She’s more refined than the others. People aren’t so likely to mind talking in shops with Nina. Now if ever I go out with Yvonne, it’s dreadful. I do wish,” added Jill in her gentle little voice, “that Annette wouldn’t keep Yvonne in the house. She lowers the tone. Don’t you think so?”

“Mmmmm,” said Lionel noncommittally. He stifled a yawn and wondered why on earth he had taken this girl out for a drink. One marked time, that was all. The war had drawn near and then receded, and the old nightmare of Europe had been brought close to Shanghai and had not receded. It hung over the city with the smoke of the burning Chinese houses across the border, a heavy, sullen cloud that would not disperse. Dr. Lionel Levy knew how long that cloud could hang in the sky. He had watched it from Austria, from Italy, from North Africa, for many years. It could stay overhead indefinitely, he knew, waiting and thickening and thinning and thickening again, while below on the ground one marked time. One ate and slept and took little girls out and asked impertinent questions of other waiting people, pushing the time past.

“Where did you say you were born?” he asked abruptly. “You are not Russian, you said?”

“Certainly I am not,” she said indignantly. “Do I talk like a Russian?”

“No, but some Russians speak English quite well, you know.” He was conscious as he spoke of his Teutonic diction.

“Oh, I know. A lot of these girls can, only they keep their accent because the men like it. No, I’m British.”

“So!”

“I am,” insisted Jill. “Really and truly.”

“And why not? Do not be so resentful, little Jill.”

“Well–so many of these English people act as if a girl at Annette’s couldn’t possibly be British. If they’d seen what I have in England!”

“You were born in England, then,” said Levy.

Jill shook her head and took the plunge. “Australia,” she said, and waited. He said nothing complimentary, however, about her lack of a cockney accent, and she reminded herself that he could not be expected to notice it. He did not even seem to be aware of that distinction between English and Australian which had so often perplexed her.

“Well,” he said, smiling quite broadly, “go on. Tell me about it. But don’t tell me you were educated in a convent.”

“But I was!” wailed Jill.

Dr. Levy sighed and ordered himself another cocktail. Jill had not finished her first; she was careful about drink.

“You don’t believe me. Well, I don’t care,” she said. “I’ll tell you anyway, and I’ll tell you the truth. I was at a convent for quite a while–almost two years, I think.”

“And when did that come to an end?”

She hesitated, frowning. She was very pretty, with fair hair and a snub nose, a cast of countenance which would have been enough, even without her profession, to explain why people thought her Russian. It was a type of prettiness to which she had obviously referred when she selected the role she played for the public, what the other girls at Annette’s knew as Jill’s baby act. Somewhere, reflected Lionel, she had learned not to overdress and not to use cosmetics; she was a girl a doctor could be seen with almost anywhere, save perhaps in the restricted European community of Shanghai, without causing comment. Not that it mattered in Shanghai, for everything and everyone there caused some sort of comment in any case.

Was she trying to remember? Lionel laughed silently at his temporary slip into bathos. No girl as egocentric as Jill would have failed to recall long since everything that she could, or wished, to keep in mind; the hesitation was only that she was deciding what lie to tell.

“I left when I was three,” said Jill.

She blurted it with some effort, and Dr. Lionel felt flattered. This was not, then, to be the ordinary story she kept for transients: “I was a slip of a girl…”

“You just walked out, did you?”

Uncertain, she peered at his sober face and then laughed. “It’s what they told me,” she explained, “when I went back to see them a few years ago. My mother must have put me in as soon as I was big enough to leave around. I don’t mean she left me on the doorstep in a basket; she paid some sort of a fee. She liked me all right,” added Jill, a trace of anxious pride in her voice. “There wasn’t any secret about it.”

“Was she pretty too?”

That pleased her; she smiled radiantly. “Oh, much prettier, and I expect I was a complication in her life. She never told anybody at the convent who my father was. But I had a stepfather, quite a well-known man in Australia, a rich one, and I suppose he didn’t want me around.”

“But this man–her husband–he did know about you, that you existed, did he?”

“Oh yes.” Jill paused, and then, again in a blurting rush, she said, “He wasn’t her husband, you see. I had, oh,...