Miss Jill

  “He would be tickled pink not to find me here when he returns,” said Ray Macklin. “You wouldn’t like to take me off his hands, would you? For dinner? It would be a kindness to all concerned, except you.”

  Jill hesitated. In a flash of time she considered the situation and decided. She would take the chance of being seen in public with him. The worst that could happen would be that somebody would tell this American where she had worked, and what did it matter? He would be going away soon, probably; he meant nothing to her, at any rate. He couldn’t hurt her.

  “All right. Thank you,” she said. “I’ll have to go home and change, of course.”

  “Sure. I’ll take you home and leave you there and come back later.”

  Jill slipped into the warm water and swam across to Maria to explain, but without waiting for her introduction Ray Macklin joined the party, talked his way into Maria’s approval, clowned with the ball, and ordered drinks all around, signing in the name of his golf-playing host. Soon they sat at a table near the pool and looked out at the flat countryside, sipping at gin and lime.

  “This is just about all right,” announced Ray. “I’m going to like Shanghai.… Blondie, did you hear me? No, she didn’t hear me. Blondie’s got the fidgets; she keeps looking at the clock. Blondie’s bored with you chaps. It couldn’t possibly be Macklin.”

  “I’m not looking at the clock,” Jill protested. “I’m getting cold, though. I think I’ll get dressed.”

  “We’d all better get dressed.” Maria stood up and started a general movement toward the dressing rooms, much to Jill’s secret relief. It was a matter of indifference to her, she reminded herself, if Macklin should find out about her, but she didn’t want him to know it just yet–not until they had gone out to dinner this one time. There was a chance that the local man would get back before they were safely out of the club, and Jill had her usual nervous feeling that she had possibly met him at one time or another at Annette’s.

  The Bastos and their friends were set down at their doors, Ray Macklin insisting on seeing Jill home in the taxi.

  “Broadway Mansions,” she said boldly to the driver. She looked at Macklin out of the corner of her eye, but he showed no signs of being startled or suspicious. Of course not, she thought; he didn’t know Shanghai. He didn’t even know enough as yet to call Maria and Company “wonks.” In America, no doubt, working girls always lived at places like Broadway Mansions. Her heart lifted. It was good to be going out to dinner, and with a stranger. It was good to be taken for granted as a human being. It couldn’t last long, but for even one evening it was very good.

  “Even for one evening. And when he does find out and everything’s spoiled, it won’t matter, because he means nothing at all to me. He’ll be going away,” she thought.

  “Is this it?” said Macklin. “Okay, Blondie; I’ll be back at seven-thirty. I’ll be seeing you.”

  Jill stood in the slowly moving elevator, trying to put her mind on her evening’s costume, but she was distracted by a foolish notion that kept intruding.

  “Glass slippers. I ought to wear glass slippers.”

  X

  Most children prefer the longer version of Cinderella, in which the Prince plays host at three balls on consecutive nights before the happy kitchenmaid, growing careless after so much success, puts off her flight until the last stroke of the clock. It was that way with Jill’s story. Ray Macklin had exaggerated a little, as he always did, when he sketched his romantic career. He did not disappear immediately. In actual fact the home office allowed him a fortnight in Shanghai before they sent him on to Nanking, and even then he knew that he was more likely than not to come back.

  “I want to see you as much as I can for as long as I can, Blondie,” he said. “What’s chances? Tomorrow, for instance. If nothing turns up and I’m still here, let’s meet at Jeff’s house for a drink and then see what develops.”

  This was at the end of the second evening, during which they had dined and danced, moving from bar to boîte at intervals of an hour or two. Stepping lightly in her own world, clad in imaginary armor, Jill had given over all worry. Here and there in the crowd she saw people she recognized, men and a few women who would have been able to bring her down to earth with a bump, she thought, but it made no difference. The end would come, but it hadn’t come yet. She ate and drank and laughed and listened, following Macklin’s outrageous prattle through Europe and Asia and Mexico and South America, all in terms of New York newspapers.

  Now, however, she was brought for a moment to a standstill. Jeff was Macklin’s Shanghai colleague, the man who was almost certain to recognize her.

  “I’ve got something to do in the late afternoon,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be better to cut out the drink and meet in town later?”

  “It would not. You can come along later if you like, but come to Jeff’s, my mysterious Blondie. We aim to take it easy. We may never get in to town at all. Gertie can always find something cold in the kitchen, and we’re all fed up with these sucker traps.”

  It was the end, but Jill still struggled with a last feeble effort. “But I don’t know them. Maybe they won’t like me.”

  “What’s this?” Ray lifted his eyebrows at her and gave a shrewd glance. He reached over and patted her hand on the table. “You’re a funny little budget, aren’t you? A very funny little budget. Come on, tell Papa what the trouble is.”

  “There isn’t any real trouble; I don’t know what you mean.” But she hung her head and began to cry. Where the line was between a real desire to cry and the inspiration that it was the thing to do, Jill could not have said.

  Ray Macklin’s hand continued to pat hers, rhythmic and soothing. “Come on, Jill,” he said. “Give. Cop out.”

  “It’s nothing, I tell you.” Tears fell into her glass.

  “Funny little budget. I’ll wait until you can talk.”

  He waited.

  “Well,” she said at last after a determined gulp, “I don’t think I ought to go to your friend’s house. I don’t know any”— she swallowed again—”any women in this town.” Which was not quite true.

  “Go on, Blondie.”

  “That’s all. I don’t know them and they don’t know me.”

  “Nonsense. You were with a whole raft of females the day you picked me up.”

  She mewed like a cat. “That’s different, and they don’t know, those little working girls. They don’t know anything about me, that way. I didn’t tell you the truth, Ray; I don’t get any money from home.”

  “No?”

  “No. I have a very good friend and he takes care of the money.”

  “Oh? Oh, I see.” He whistled a little and pushed his own glass around on the table. “This being so, how come you’ve been able to go out with me?” he asked after a short pause. “Doesn’t your sugar daddy object to that? Who is he, anyway? Anybody I know?”

  “You couldn’t possibly know him; he’s a–a Chinese gentleman. He doesn’t object to my having friends. He only wants to help me until I get my certificate, and then I’m to try to go straight.”

  Macklin looked up at that and grinned. “Honest?”

  “Yes,” she said defiantly. “Why not?”

  “Mmmm. So he doesn’t mind about me?”

  “He doesn’t mind about anybody if I like them. He doesn’t know about you particularly. It’s my own affair, what I do with my time; I don’t see him all the time, you know. He’s married and his wife keeps an eye on him, the way these Chinese women do.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said Macklin. “I don’t know anything about Chinese; I don’t know anybody in town but you. I did think of dropping in at one of these dance places and promoting a Korean girl or something, but you caught my eye, Blondie, and kept me busy.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, a delighted smile breaking out on her face.

  “I’m that way, you see,” continued Macklin, sitting back. “Lots of guys don’t really care how they spend an evening, but I like
a girl who listens when I talk. Except at times,” he said thoughtfully, “I’d rather talk than go to bed, any day. Is your Chinese boy friend like that too?”

  She giggled. “He’s not much for that sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing, Blondie?”

  “Oh–bed.”

  “But see here,” he said, taking her hand again, “you must be awfully lonely, what with one thing and another. What do you do with yourself? Bat around with Maria all the time, or what?”

  “Oh, I walk around and look in windows.”

  “It’s a queer thing, all round. You must tell me how it all happened one of these days.… Now then,” he said, looking at his watch, “I’ve got to run along. See you at Jeff’s about six, okay?”

  Jill’s astonishment kept her silent until he had actually left the table. “Wait a minute!” she cried. “I told you, I can’t come.”

  “Why not? You said Dr. Fu Manchu doesn’t care what you do on your day off, didn’t you?”

  “But what about your friend-I mean Jeff’s wife? Won’t she be furious?”

  Ray Macklin walked over to the table and leaned on it with both hands, bringing his face close to Jill’s. “You’ve been reading books,” he said accusingly. “Gert’s American, Blondie. She minds her business as long as you mind yours. Gert won’t give a damn about your private financial arrangements any more than I do. I’ve got to reform you, I can see that. You’re too damned British. You’re class-conscious, Blondie. You’re a snob.” He tweaked her nose. “Now you wash your face and stop being dumb,” he said. “See you at six.”

  He walked out rapidly.

  Lying back in attitudes of complete heat exhaustion, the three Americans, Jeff, Ray, and Gert, talked about the Japanese. Sitting on the edge of a chair which invited her in vain to relax in similar fashion, Jill listened to every word. As the evening progressed this listening became more difficult, for the words began to lose their pristine crispness and the ideas behind them grew more and more muddled. Gert, Ray, and Jeff were drinking in their fashion, which was a new and shocking one to Jill. She had never gone in very much for drinking; Sanyi had bought her wine rather than spirits, and Annette, in the later phase, frowned on excess of most kinds, but most particularly on this.

  “They’re bluffing,” said Jeff. “I don’t mean to say they’re bluffing indefinitely”—he stumbled a little over the last two words—”but I bet you whatever you like, Macklin, whatever you like to name, they don’t mean it. If Washington ever got hard-boiled—poof !”

  “Sure,” said Gert. “They’re bluffing.” She reached out and picked up the cocktail shaker. It seemed to feel lighter than she had expected; she stared at it impassively for a moment and then, without taking her eyes from it, she raised her voice. “Boy!” she screamed. “Boy!”

  A Chinese in a white coat appeared at the door.

  “More martini,” said Gert. “Jill, you don’t mind waiting a minute, do you?”

  “Oh no, I don’t really want—”

  Yes, she does,” said Macklin. “She wants another, but she’ll be a good girl and wait. Listen, Jeff, if you’d been in Manila the last few months you’d change your mind. I’m telling you, those boys know more about it than you do over here, and they say—”

  “Manila–vanilla, I spit on Manila. You go home and tell ’em in Washington, Ray. Tell ’em to play up the sanctions and see what happens.”

  “They’re bluffing,” said Gert, and belched delicately.

  Jill sat very quiet, like an intelligent puppy, watching each speaker in turn. For an hour after her arrival she had been frozen with a combination of emotions. Terror at being back on the right side of the fence for the first time since the days of Botchan had mingled with a gratitude toward Gert which almost amounted to weeping hysteria. For Gert was very decent to her. Gert hadn’t acted up at all. They had none of them paid any special attention to her; she had been left to do just as she liked, except that Ray insisted that she keep a drink in her hand. She had simply gone on sitting there, admiring Gert’s clothes and the conversation. For the past half-hour, though, she had grown conscious of other feelings. It was obvious that nobody was going to say anything particularly new from now on, and Jill was getting hungry. She was so hungry, indeed, that she felt the beginning of indigestion, which repeated applications of gin and vermouth did not help.

  She was suddenly aware of a silence. Focusing her eyes, which had been staring at her hostess without seeing anything for the past few minutes, she realized uncomfortably that they were waiting for her. Somebody must have said something to her; indeed, now that she thought of it, she had heard Jeff’s voice aimed in her direction.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I just wanted to know what you think about things,” he said. “According to young Macklin here, you have your hand on the pulse of Chinese opinion. What’s Chinese opinion about the Japanese?”

  “Oh. Well-they have lots of opinions.”

  For some drunken reason everyone seemed to find this very funny.

  “They hope there won’t be trouble, of course,” she added. “They never go out looking for trouble. But I guess there will be. I mean, I think they expect it.”

  “There you are,” said Macklin with triumph. “Bluffing, my granny’s left hind foot. Gert, when do we eat?”

  At last, at last, there was food–cold ham and beef and Gruyère cheese and coffee. Gert wavered back and forth from the table, sometimes talking at the phone, urging friends to come over, and sometimes speaking cryptically to her husband: “That was the office, but skip it; they said it’ll hold till morning,” or “That was Margery and it’s all fixed up for the week end. Bridge Sunday night.” She was absent-minded with Jill, but still as kind as ever. She seemed to have forgotten that Jill was not an old acquaintance and spoke at length about friends who seemed to possess only Christian names, assuming that they were Jill’s friends too. During one visit to the bedroom, where she gave Jill the freedom of the bath and waited outside for her, dreamily reddening her lips the while, she talked about her children.

  “There they are,” she said, waving toward framed photographs on a chest of drawers. “I left ’em in California at school. Jeff almost made me stay there, too, but I wouldn’t leave him to come out here alone. It’s miserable for a bachelor here don’t you think?”

  “It must be,” said Jill.

  “Anyway, if you’re always going to be careful you’ll never do anything but sit at home on your fanny, that’s what I say. Still, I do miss the kids. Have you got any? Excuse me, I don’t even know if you’re married; maybe you don’t like kids?”

  “I’m not married, but I love children.”

  Gert shook her head slowly. “Liar. You don’t. Nobody likes any kids but their own.”

  “But I really do.”

  “You don’t have to be polite here, kid. Let it pass.” In a sudden access of severity Gert turned her children’s photographs to the wall.

  “Gert!” sounded from the living room in a roar. “What goes on in there? Talking about your operations?”

  “We had better join the boys,” said Gert, and they went back arm in arm. It was all very friendly and confusing.

  What made it even more exquisitely confusing was that Jill had only that afternoon been doing a little light reading in a book she hadn’t seen since her school days: David Copperfield. She had read and wept over certain passages which had not impressed her in her youth: “Oh, the river! … I know it’s like me! I know that I belong to it. I know that it’s the natural company of such as I am! It comes from country places, where there was once no harm in it–and it creeps through the dismal streets, defiled and miserable–and it goes away, like my life, to a great sea, that is always troubled-and I feel that I must go with it! … I want to say nothing for myself, I am bad, I am lost. I have no hope at all.”

  Only that afternoon it had seemed to break on her for the first time, what the book was talking about and what she had b
een doing with her life. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time for Jill. She had sat hunched over the book, crying and crying, until B. W. came in and asked her what on earth was the matter.

  “I am bad, I am lost,” had been ringing in her ears. Lost, lost, lost! Yet here was Gert linking arms with her, and everyone knowing at least part of the truth, and still they were laughing and drinking and friendly.

  “I do feel dizzy,” thought Jill. “I wonder if the drinks are stronger than I thought?”

  “Well, Blondie,” said Ray Macklin in the taxi, “that wasn’t so bad, was it? A good old-fashioned home evening, just what I like.”

  “It was awfully nice. She’s sweet, isn’t she?”

  “Gert? Oh, she’s not so bad. Talks too much, but most women do. American women, that is, not my sweet little Blondie.” He nuzzled her hair. “Fu Manchu’s little Blondie, that is.”

  “Oh, don’t!”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t talk like that. You’re teasing me.”

  “Nonsense, I’m just filling in the awkward silences. All this time I’m wondering what this does to me, this new development. You see, Blondie, R. Macklin applies everything to Macklin and doesn’t really give a damn about anything else. Now what Macklin is wondering is this: Does Fu Manchu make everything, in a manner of speaking, simpler?”