“I hate them,” she said to herself, brooding. “I hope the Japanese come over soon and wipe them out, the conceited fat rich fools. Now when I was with Botchan, nobody would have dared talk to me like that.”
Jill dried a tear from her temple, where it had slid down as she lay facing the lamp. She thought of the clean sweet air in Japan. Hong Kong air felt as if it had been served up and then warmed over. She suddenly felt energetic; not energetic enough to get up and put on her shoes and go out for a walk, but enough at least to write a letter. She moved quickly to the table where her few books were stacked. The dub was modern and she found glazed note paper in a drawer, though she had been ready, if necessary, to use Chinese rice paper. Without hesitation she sat down and wrote to Botchan. The time of her exile had been long enough, surely, to make it safe for him now even if she wrote to him direct, and anyway, it was out of the question to get in touch with him any other way. She could no longer use Hidei as a go-between, since in her last letter she herself had boasted of her coming marriage, and it had never taken place.
It seemed to Jill that she had never been so fluent before.
More than half the letter was written in Japanese, she reflected proudly: Botchan would be pleased with that. The spirit of her composition was right, too. She told Botchan that she was lonely and that she had been unhappy in China, though unhappiness was only to be expected in this life and she was resigned to it. “I wish I could come back to you,” she wrote. “My heart is in Japan forever.”
It was a pretty, harmless sort of regret, and when she had finished writing it out she was finished as well with her black mood. However, there lay the letter on the table, a very creditable effort. She didn’t want to waste it. She folded it and addressed the envelope to Botchan, care of Kikusan. If he were still in Tokyo, she knew, he would get that letter sooner or later.
She took it out to the number-one boy and told him to put it into the post, and he bowed, and she went back to her little room and her pipe.
A few days later Mr. Yeh turned up again and advised her to get ready for a short journey.
“We are going to Canton for the week end,” he said. “I know you will like Canton.”
XIV
Mr. Yeh called for Jill early next evening and took her down to the wharf, to the Canton boat, in his usual efficient manner. He was more taciturn than usual, however, for in the ordinary way he would have bubbled with information about her new temporary patron. (The expedition had a patron, of course; Mr. Yeh never met any traveling expenses of his own.) In the ordinary way Mr. Yeh liked to show off his cleverness and boast about his customers. This time he merely said:
“It is one Mr. Chu, a millionaire, who is buying our tickets and arranging the hotel, and of course he will give you a handsome fee besides. I have made that quite clear, though he was not too eager, frankly, to take any woman with us. We must go to Canton on business, and I convinced him that you will make our journey more pleasant.”
“Oh, indeed! Well, I’m not sure––”
“You will enjoy it,” insisted Mr. Yeh. “Afterward we will return by way of Macao and play fan-tan. You will love fan-tan.”
Jill shrugged. At any rate, she had never seen Canton and it would be instructive. Lots of the men at the club had come from there and they had told her about it lovingly: how there were houses in the city, behind the Wall, which had not been changed in hundreds of years, and how there were gardens which their ancestors had laid out. They talked about the gates, and the shops, and the food–above all, the food. No doubt this Mr. Chu, the millionaire, would be like the other rich men at the club, well dressed in the foreign manner and possessing that gentle air of polite authority which so impressed servants.
Aboard the little boat she did not see Mr. Chu until Yeh ushered her into a cabin where he sat. Mr. Chu was a bit of a surprise. It is true that there are Chinese millionaires who prefer to wear their national dress in cities like Hong Kong and Canton, but most of them do not look shabby and even downright dirty, as did Mr. Chu. He had an odd manner, too. He did not greet Jill with hearty good will or with the initial courtesy she expected of her clients. When Mr. Yeh presented her the millionaire looked at her once with a keen, all-over glance in which there was no trace of warmth or personal interest, and then he grunted and spoke to Mr. Yeh in a language Jill could not understand. When Yeh went out of the cabin to get some soda water Chu did not address Jill at all until his business associate came back.
The trip to Canton lasted the whole night, and if Mr. Yeh had not arranged in advance for Jill’s opium tray she did not think she could have remained polite. Mr. Chu was very hard sledding indeed. He did not make love to her, but that would not have surprised her to any great extent, as many Chinese, especially opium smokers, paid for her company only to enjoy her prattle. Mr. Chu, though, did not enjoy her prattle. He didn’t enjoy anything, evidently. Either he dozed, or drank soda water, or talked to Mr. Yeh in the incomprehensible dialect. However, it was a moonlight night and the silver light streamed through the porthole in a thick, brilliant bar. The opium was good, and the sensation of moving gently along upstream while one smoked was queer and pleasurable. “I’m sure I’ll love Canton,” Jill said to Mr. Yeh.
When they arrived in the morning everything seemed anti-climactic. Refreshed by a short nap at sunrise and excited by an overdose of opium, Jill expected to start out immediately on a sight-seeing tour, especially as there was a large car waiting for the travelers. Instead, she and her suitcase, but not the baggage of the men, were bundled into a hotel near the wharf, a dingy ugly little hotel, the looks of which surprised even the experienced Jill. Many Chinese hotels didn’t look like much from the outside, but this place was really second-rate. Mr. Chu was without doubt the most eccentric millionaire she had ever met. She said so indignantly to Mr. Yeh.
“Yes, yes, but it is only for a few hours,” he said soothingly. They stood in the cramped entry of the place which could scarcely be called a lobby. Jill’s bag had been carried halfway down the wooden-floored corridor and into a bare room which smelled of must and mice. Mr. Chu was signing the register at the desk, and over his shoulder the gowned clerk stared at her like an owl.
“But why can’t I go sight-seeing while you do your business?” she asked, almost whimpering. “This is a hell of a holiday you’ve brought me on. It feels more like a funeral.”
Mr. Yeh looked confused and said, “Shhh.”
“I want to go to Shameen,” continued Jill. “If your old millionaire is going to be so crabby, why should I stay here at all?”
“He has things on his mind, and after this morning it will all go better. Now be a good girl and rest. You haven’t had any sleep at all, and that makes you cross.”
“Aren’t we having breakfast or anything? Why,” said Jill in natural amazement, “Mr. Chu hasn’t even drunk any tea! What’s all the hurry?”
Mr. Chu came forward rapidly, his gown flapping as he walked. He seized Yeh’s arm and said something, then bowed to Jill with the first polite gesture he had made since their meeting. The two men walked out the door into the hot Canton sunlight. Jill sighed and went into her room, where she sat on the hard bed and looked around, her nose scornfully wrinkled. The average American or Englishwoman would have demanded much more comfort and elegance than Jill did; she accepted placidly the discomforts and barenesses of everyday life in the Orient. She did not object, when they came her way, to the usual cold floors, hard chairs, and unfamiliar food. But this hotel room passed her limit of tolerance. The more she looked at it, the more astonished and indignant she became. The padded bedcover was filthy. There were large stains on the plaster walls, and the cracks probably harbored bugs. The wooden pail which did duty as a commode had not been cleaned and was without a cover.
“They’ve insulted me,” she decided. Should she show her displeasure by walking out on Messrs. Chu and Yeh, going down to the dock, and embarking for Hong Kong that very minute? Probably, however, there
was no boat that very minute. Besides, she would have to buy the ticket out of her own purse, which necessity dismayed her soul, grown thrifty since the old days with Konya.
“Oh well, they’ll come and get me soon,” she thought. “I won’t have to sleep here. It’s a waiting room, that’s all.”
She ordered something to eat, and after emptying a bowl of pork and noodles she went out for a walk. It was a dazzlingly bright day and the air was moist and oppressive, far more so than Hong Kong’s atmosphere. Shy of using her few scraps of Cantonese, Jill wandered about aimlessly, floundering in her efforts to find something approximating a shopping center. She made her way down twisting streets as narrow as alleyways, sometimes coming up against a dead end and feeling foolish. Nowhere did she encounter a European to whom she might have appealed.
She felt the sweat trickling down to her eyebrows from her hair. Canton was not living up to her expectations. To be sure it felt and smelled like the ancient city she had heard about, but she could not seem to see it, somehow. She was trapped on the ground between those high walls that went on so endlessly. The streets were full of working people in blue cotton or black amah-silk, and it seemed to her that they always stopped talking when she passed their little groups and stared after her and wondered what she was up to. She wondered herself. Timidity made her think she had gone much farther from the hotel than she really had, and it was the sheerest luck that brought her back to the water front at a place she recognized. Tall, strong women, their hair hanging down their backs in fat plaits, were doing the jobs of stevedores and porters all down the street. She brushed past them and ran thankfully into the shade of the dirty little hotel, her head throbbing.
A sort of nausea overwhelmed her as she re-entered the room. She was oppressed with that curse of all wanderers, a sensation of being cut off forever from the static people around her. She felt hopelessly set apart. Even the stares of the people from which she had just fled, even the obvious curiosity of the dirty children who had gathered about her whenever she paused, and followed her persistently for many minutes, did not reassure her. She was convinced that she was only an invisible bit of restlessness drifting through life, brushing past the solid, healthy bodies of luckier beings, like those stevedore women who had been too immersed in their work to notice her. She had neither weight nor meaning in this life; she was only a sorrowful ghost.
It was with a sob of relief that she sank down on the unyielding bed next to the opium tray. She almost loved the dingy room now, though she had hated it an hour before. The opium lamp, lit, turned the ugly little cubicle into home.
Jill had gone to bed after a day alternately passable and horrible. She had not dared go out again for fear of missing Mr. Yeh and the relief he would bring with him. Once or twice she had very nearly gone out in search of some immediate transportation back to Hong Kong, but the effort of acting thus independently was somehow impossible to make. Besides, the room boy was friendly and reassuring and spoke an adequate mixture of English and Cantonese. He had advised her to wait, and he had brought her food at intervals. At last, telling herself she could at any rate catch a boat the next day, she went to bed, and after all there did not seem to be bugs. Or if there were, they were all sunk in an opium stupor.
It must have been after midnight when the door opened. The light went on and as Jill woke with a flash, as she always did, she saw five or six men shambling in, clad in the greenish-drab uniform of the Chinese military. The place seemed quite crowded with soldiers swarming about, and she could not realize for a long time what was happening. She reached for her dressing gown and hastily covered herself with it, knowing that the sight of a bare bosom is one of the most indecent things in China.
The man in authority, a short, bullet-headed chap, began to address her in reasonably good English. He knew her name and treated her with an impersonality so definite that he managed to be neither rude nor courteous.
“You had better put on your coat and get up,” he said. “Sit down here. Thank you.”
Behind her straight chair she could hear the guards shuffling into position. The chief sat down opposite her, across a wooden table that had been brought in by the scared room boy. He spread papers in front of him and took notes as they talked with a Chinese brush pen.
“You are of Russian nationality?”
Jill tried to think quickly, but she was still stupid and she succeeded only in hesitating. The way his eyes narrowed was a warning, but she could not bring herself to take the interview very seriously. She had lived so long in a treaty port and then in a Crown Colony that she still thought of the Chinese Army as an opéra-bouffe group, something one laughed at or praised patronizingly from one’s seat down in front.
“Yes,” she said at last. She had remembered that she always masqueraded as a White Russian when her Chinese clients were casual acquaintances, because it saved tedious explanations. When she claimed to be a British-born girl, an Australian, she was such an anomaly among her fellow business girls that the Chinese were incredulous and inclined to mock at her as a pretender. But there were many blond Russians in the brothels, girls who had been born in Mukden or Harbin or China, and the Chinese were accustomed to them.
On the other hand, she slowly realized, her British nationality might be a good card to play under these special circumstances. How could she prove it, though? She had deliberately left her precious passport in Hong Kong, for Mr. Yeh had made all the arrangements and bribed the petty official whose job it was to demand passports. She always let him take care of those details; he had never himself seen her passport or known that she was British.
“How long have you lived in Hong Kong?”
The catechism droned on, a dull list of stereotyped demands for information, and as Jill obediently replied her mind went back to the police station in Tokyo.
“How long have you been in Japan? When did you come back to China after that?”
“I wasn’t in China before I went to Japan.”
He wrote something on his papers impassively. She knew he did not believe her.
“Now, on what date did you go to Russia?”
“I never went to Russia.”
“It is no use to lie, we know everything. You went to Russia in the year 1936.”
“Oh, that! Excuse me, yes, I did, but it was only on the way to England: I had to cross Russia to get to England.”
The chief wrote down a whole line of characters.
“Now when you went to Russia, did you get a visa?”
“Why, yes, of course, a transit visa. How otherwise could I––”
“Why?”
Jill regarded his flat black eyes, uncomprehending. “I don’t quite understand what you’re asking me,” she said.
He said, “I ask you, why could you get a visa for the Soviet when you are a White Russian? White Russians are not popular in Moscow. Most White Russians are afraid to go to Moscow. Therefore, I ask you, how could you so easily get a visa from the Russians?”
Jill gaped at him and said, “Uhhhh…”
A gleam of satisfaction came into his eyes.
“Why did you not go instead the other way?” he asked. “Why not go through Japan and Canada to England? Especially since your heart is in Japan?”
A tiny ray of light shot through her mystification. The letter to Botchan! That was it!
The ray of light broadened and grew stronger. That letter, written for the most part in Japanese–the boy at the club who was to have posted it–Mr. Yeh! Of course. It was clear now. She recalled something she had heard about Mr. Yeh months ago, something she had stowed away in the back of her cupboard of facts where she kept many items of information about many men. Mr. Yeh was an ardent Nationalist. Mr. Yeh was no doubt working for the Chinese Government in his own peculiar fashion. The boy at the club, suspicious of the letter and its address, had reported the matter and given the letter to Mr. Yeh. Mr. Yeh had promptly turned it over to his nearest headquarters in Canton, or to agents in Hong
Kong who had devised this Canton trip. Mr. Chu was an excuse to entice her to Chinese territory, away from the hovering protection of the European authorities. No doubt Mr. Yeh was getting a big reward for his capture of a dangerous Red spy.
With appalled intensity she remembered other things which fitted in. There had been a number of news items in the press, during the past month, dated from Canton. A big spy hunt was on in South China. The national news agency reported regularly on spies discovered, spies proven, spies executed. There had been a protest, blandly ignored by the Nationalists, from foreign correspondents who were not allowed to witness these executions.
“I suggest,” the chief was saying, “that you are not a friend to the Republic of China.”
Jill protested her fondness for the Republic. The chief was not listening.
“I suggest you are working for Japan, at the command of your government, the Russian Soviet,” he said. “You had much better confess of your own free will, or we shall have to persuade you.”
There was a long silence, and one of the guards hawked and spat on the floor.
“Look here,” said Jill at last. “I do have something to confess, but it’s not what you think.”
“Ah,” said the chief, and moved his chair nearer to the table, ready to take notes on a fresh sheet of paper.
“I’m not Russian at all,” said Jill. “I’m British.”
The Chinese looked at her without speaking, nor did he write anything down.
“I’m a British subject,” insisted Jill, “by birth. You haven’t any right to arrest me or to hold me here.”
The officer smiled a small, scornful smile. “You should not try to lie unless you can think of better stories than that. You are very well known in Shanghai and also in Hong Kong. Everyone has known you for years. Everyone knows you are Russian. Do you take me for an ignorant coolie?”