“Yes?”
“Hindeed yes. And I means ‘insane’ to the letter. A capting in that line can be rich in three voyages, for he has a huge share and there is much to share, but my actuary friend at Lloyd’s puts his expectation of surwival at precisely two and seven-eighth voyages, haw haw! And even as I says it we are at the end of our own perilous woyage: Great Coram Street, home and beauty!”
To speak plainly, Mrs Jorrocks was not pleasing to look at, nor did she seem over-pleased to see us. She looked askance at my baggage until Mr J. whispered loudly to her that I was a great Dutch merchant-prince “travelling incog”, whereupon she creased her huge ham-like face into a smile and called me “Moungseer” each time she addressed me.
A shifty, snot-nosed boy was told off to carry my bags upstairs.
“And wash your hands first, Binjamin!” roared Jorrocks, “for I’m sure your thumb has been in my marmalade-pot as ever, you cupboard-headed little warmint!”
A pink, jolly maid called Batsay brought me hot water and a tin hip-bath. I did not look at her lasciviously for I thought it possible that she might furnish Mr J.’s own diversion in those times of the year when it is not permitted to chase foxes in England.
Scrubbed all over and wearing a change of linen, I went downstairs to find Mr Jorrocks pacing up and down, peering at a great gold watch in his hand. I read his mind for I, too, was ready for dinner.
“It will be but a snack, I fears,” he said apologetically, “for Mrs J. knew not when I was to return, nor that I would have the pleasure of your company and, indeed, she is but a few hours back from her mother’s in Tooting. But she has found a few prowisions in the cold larder – cheese, cold ham, cold beef, cold mutton – all the delicacies of the season as the sailor said, haw, haw! – and I daresay we shall make shift to tighten our weskit-buttons somewhat.”
Indeed, the repast was plentiful. First came a great tureen of gravy soup, a new thing for me but strong and appetising, into which Mr J. splashed quite the third of a bottle of brown sherry.
“Bristol Milk,” he chuckled. “I often lies avake vondering wot they feeds the cows on in Bristol!”
“Haw, haw,” I said politely.
Then we attacked the cold meats, of which there was great store: the round of beef was the size of a trap-drum and the other things were to the same scale. In between, we drank prime stout from the Marquess of Cornwallis hard by (he proved to be a tavern, not a nobleman, it was very puzzling) and toasted each other again and again with something called Crane’s Particklar (“hot and strong, real black-strap stuff, none of your French rot-gut,” Mr J. explained).
There was also a dish of hot buttered parsnips; they were very good. I ate them all, for Mr J. declared they spoiled his appetite for the meats. Then Batsay brought in a dish of things called “Poor Knights of Windsor”: these were pieces of bread and jam fried. They do not sound good but they are. Mr Jorrocks’s Stilton cheese was even better than Mr Creed’s; he pretended that it was “so werry frisky” that he had to hold it down on the table as I scooped, lest it walk away. This was a British joke, of course. We were by then, I think, a little drunk. He helped me to my bedroom, then I helped him to his, then he again to mine; this went on until Mrs J. appeared in a splendid déshabillé and coughed meaningfully.
In the morning – rather late in the morning – he and I breakfasted frugally off some cold mutton and bloaters and rich, dark marmalade from Oxford (where the English make capital sausages and also have a famous college called Belial) and then he lent me a curious little vehicle called a tub-trap, with the child Binjamin to drive, and a list of addresses of people who might have a shop-premise to let. By dinner-time I had made a bargain for a little shop with snug living-quarters above it, between a street called Strand and the cabbage-exchange of the Convent Gardens. We collected my Delft the next day and laid some of it out in an attractive fashion, using some good shop-fittings of the true San Domingo mahogany, racks and shelves and drawers, which I had seen lying in the back of Mr J.’s warehouse and which he let me have for one sovereign. This was not dear, for they were well-made, although dirty. The windows of the shop I washed myself, for in those days I had no stinking pride and Binjamin refused to do it for less than threepence. Then I put the shutters up and, on the way back to Great Coram Street, struck a bargain with a sign-writer to paint “C. VAN CLEEF & CO., WHOLESALE CHINA WAREHOUSE” in dirty white letters on the door-post, for I was learning how these things are done in England.
The next day Mrs J. condescended to come a-marketing with me: I bought a nice brass bedstead, a genuine hair mattress and a feather one to go on top of it, some bolsters and pillows and sheets and things of that kind, a little round-bellied stove, a kettle, a tea-pot and some drink. Yes, and some food. Then we went to a Foundling School and I bought a boy for a year to keep the place clean. I could have had a girl but I was wise, wise. The boy looked honest and stupid and, for his age, strong; when I showed him the place under the counter where he was to sleep, he was so happy he wept: he had never seen anything so comfortable. I could never quite make out his name so I called him “You”; he answered to it cheerfully. He was a good boy.
I took my leave, with much gratitude, of the good Jorrockses, kissing the hand of Mrs J., which made her even redder and to cry “Vell, I do declare!” I gave Batsay a shilling but nothing to Binjamin for I knew he had stolen quite so much as that from my breeches while pretending to brush them.
I did not open my shop the first day I entered it; I was sleepy; I slept all day and, to speak plainly, spent the evening whoring. You may depend upon it, there is no woman in the world to compare with a street-bred, fourteen-year-old London girl – and I speak as one who has sailed the Seven Seas and whored in most of their ports. Only the Japanese can compare. The one I selected was clean, well-finished at all points of her charming little body and, she told me, “new to the game”. She explained that she had taken up this profession because the food at home was meagre and she had an insatiable lust for little meat pies. The thought of them, it seemed, maddened her like wine. I bought her an abundance of these pies, hot; but only a little gin, for I had already long known that a girl full of food is flushed and beset with carnal thoughts, while a girl flushed with wine is often little more than a nuisance.
Certainly, when we got to bed she went about her work with unfeigned enthusiasm; I had never known such an indefatigable gymnast, she was gifted, gifted. Never have I laid out a few little meat pies so profitably.
At dawn, as the free-roaming roosters who live in the thick dung of the Strand commenced to crow hideously, I opened one eye and was sorry to see the child investigating the pockets of my breeches. I had taken the breeches off, you understand. I had of course hidden my money, too. She explained, quite unabashed, that she had been merely seeking the price of a little hot meat pie to stay her on the journey home to Tooley Street, where her father, who would beat her, was a tailor’s cutter, and that she would have taken no more. I think she was telling the truth although I was not a credulous man, even in those days.
I gave her the price of six twopenny pies and promised to give her the same – and her supper – whenever she was hungry. She visited me often after that, often. Sometimes she brought her little sister, who would sit in the corner, fascinated, and from time to time would make us a pot of Mr J.’s delicious tea, or run to the shop on the corner for a little, hot meat pie for her sister. Sometimes we let her come into the bed; she was charmingly inquisitive.
I wish I could remember their names but I am old now and can only recall the deeds. She – the older one – used to call me her “dear little Suffolk Punch” although I am not little and often told her that my home was in Holland, not Suffolk, which is a flat, rainy Province in the East of England.
After that first night with the girl whose name I cannot recall I was so tired that I lay in bed all day again, with the shutters of the shop still up. In the late afternoon the boy “You” came upstairs and rapped on my door, saying exci
tedly that “a right, prime, bang-up, slap-dash, out-and-out swell cove” was hammering on the shop-door with a “cane with a ’orse’s ’ead ’andle”. I considered this carefully, wondering how the child could have learned such language in a Charity School.
“Tell him,” I said at last, “that your master will be happy to wait upon him should he care to call again tomorrow.”
When I arose in the late evening, dressed to go out for supper and any other entertainment the night might afford, the boy “You” told me that the swell cove had cursed most dreadfully and said that he would by no means again venture into so vile a part of the town. I accepted this philosophically.
It was quite two afternoons before he – the swell cove – came back. The shop was now open and the shutters down. He was, indeed, a very swell cove: his hat shone like a looking-glass, his coachman-like surtout bore countless frogs, lappets and capes (the topmost of which was trimmed with the curly black fur from Afghanistan) and a glance out of the window told me that the phaeton he had arrived in was of the very finest, with a coat of arms on the panel of the door and a monogram embroidered on the hammer-cloth.
“Good afternoon, milord,” I said civilly, rubbing my hands in a tradesmanly way, as I supposed he would expect. “You are interested in old blue-and-white wares?”
He stared at me. I stared back, for I was not an Englishman and did not understand the niceties of class.
“I might be and then again I might not,” he said at last and, turning his back, began to examine such of the stock as I had chosen to lay out.
“How much,” he asked languidly, “is that?” pointing with the littlest finger of his gloved hand to a rather good small pot with an impeccable glaze.
“That?” I asked, raising an amused eyebrow. “That toy is a shilling. If you really want it you may pay me next time you are passing.”
He glowered at me. I picked up the piece and sneered at it, as though it were a mere pottery cow-creamer. “The piece to the right of it is thirty guineas, the piece to the left is fifty. This piece, since you are my first customer, and since it is of no value, you may have as a gift.”
His face darkened horridly.
“You are an insolent rascal,” he said quietly and dangerously.
I opened my fingers and let the little pot fall to the floor, where it was dashed to a thousand fragments. I snapped my fingers; the boy “You” crept out with a broom and swept the fragments away. The lord continued to glare at me. I looked back at him, not uncivilly. At last he turned on his heel and strode out of the shop. My shop, that is to say.
The boy, as I turned towards the stairs, gazed at me with saucer-eyes.
“Beg pardon, Sir,” he said, “but had you ought to have done that, Sir? ’Im being a lord, I mean?”
“Time will tell,” I said enigmatically, “and the end justifies the means.”
“Yes Sir, I’m sure Sir,” he said. I mounted the first two stairs, then a thought struck me. “Are you warm enough at night, ‘You’?” I asked.
“Oh, Sir, yes Sir, warm as toast.”
“Because there is a great deal of sacking and soft rags in the chest from which the Delft came.”
“Yes Sir, thankyou, Sir, beg pardon Sir, I have already used it for bedding, but it is as good as new, Sir, I swears.”
“Good boy. Now, all I ask is that, each week, when the weather is sunny, you shall spread it all out in the backyard to air it and to prevent smells. On the same day you shall go to the public fountain in the Convent Gardens vegetable-market and wash yourself all over with yellow soap. Here is twopence for the soap. You shall have the same each week unless I can smell you. The first smelliness and I shall beat you cruelly. You should make quite a halfpenny a week out of the soap-money if you are careful. But mind: no smells!”
“Yes Sir, thankyou Sir, I swear you shall not have the least annoyance.” He was a well-spoken child for a charity-bastard although thin, thin.
I trudged up to my brass bedstead feeling all the noble emotions of an English gentleman, while he, no doubt, scuttled in to his cosy rat’s-nest under the counter. A moment later I was at the head of the stairs.
“You!” I roared. He was there in a twinkling.
“Why have I fresh long candles in my chamber-sticks? What has been done with last night’s snuff-ends?” The child quaked, with terror but not, I think, with guilt.
“Sir,” he said, “there was but a quarter-inch of tallow left in each stick, so I recharged them. I scraped out the ends and have melted the into the lid of a tin box, thinking to use them with a rag wick so as to read my Pilgrim’s Progress each night, as the Charity-school master bade me. I truly thought, Sir, that they were my perquisites: I am no thief, I swear.”
“Hrrumph,” I said, as I had heard Englishmen say. “Well, be that as it may, put some clothes on and run to the shop on the corner and fetch me three little fourpenny mutton pies, hot, for my supper. Aye, and a pennyworth of fried peas. Here is a shilling and a penny. And look sharp!”
When he returned I had changed into my better clothes and told him that I had, after all, decided to sup out.
“Do what you will with the pies,” I said in a gruff, English voice, “I do not care. And, listen, ‘You’, each week you may have one penny-dip candle for reading by. This is no kindness, it is because I cannot afford to support little blind bastards.”
I spent the next few days chiefly in bed, plucking up my strength for the battle before me, whoring a little but also thinking a great deal about how a dealer in Delft should go about becoming rich. Once or twice I sent for a hansom cab and prowled about that area between St James’s Palace and Regent Street where, in those day, the serious dealers in old pottery and porcelain held their state. I was shocked – and, of course, pleased – to find how ignorant most of them were. One or two – and they had Jewish names – knew something: not as much as me, but something. The others filled their windows with flashy rubbish. What I did learn from all of them, however, was the prices that could be asked; they amazed me. I, in turn, was amazed that my mama, who had never left her native Province, should have given me such good advice in respect of “walking around and about”.
I did not go into the shops of the dealers with Jewish names and no ignorance; I went into the shops where the goods in the window were laughably over-priced, for I reasoned (and this is still good reasoning) that a man who over-prices foolishly will make mistakes in the other direction, too. I spent a few pounds carefully in such shops. Later in my life I made a great many lamentable mistakes but in those early days I made only one, for I seemed to bear a charmed life. This was it, and I tell it without shame for it was beautifully done. So was I.
Walking into a nasty little mud-pie of a shop, far from Bond Street, I noticed on the floor an incomparable saucer, polychromed, yet from the very earliest part of the Ming Dynasty, when such wares were made with great difficulty and then only for the Emperor himself and his concubines. I kicked the saucer gently as I passed it. It rang true. It was a jewel, a jewel, unflawed. Better, it was dirty and crusted with tide-marks of old milk and a great, horrid, ginger pussy-cat was schlipp-schlopping some sour milk from it.
I walked around the shop, pretending to look at his pitiful stock, then said: “There is nothing here quite in my line, but I have taken a fancy to your pussy-cat, for my little daughter has begged me again and again to buy her just such a pussy-cat.”
“Aarrgh,” said the shop-keeper, “aarrgh. My own liddle daughter loves that there pussy-cat better than life itself. I vouldn’t sell that pussy-cat for a fi’-pound note, I swear I vouldn’t, for I could never look my little girl in the face agin.”
“You are trying to say that this pussy-cat costs six pounds?” I asked.
“Yes, Sir.”
I dealt out six good English pounds, scooped the noxious beast into my arms and, as though it were an after-thought, bent over to pick up the saucer.
“The pussy-cat will be accustomed to its own milk-
bowl,” I said off-handedly. “It is dirty but I shall take it with me.”
“Oh no, no, no, Sir,” he cried. “No, not by no means. Vy, that saucer there ’as sold me three pussy-cats in as many months!”
I looked at him without expression.
“Would you care,” I asked “to buy this pussy-cat back for one pound? I have just noticed that it is not precisely the colour of pussy-cat my daughter pines for.”
“No, Sir, thankyou, Sir,” he said, “for to tell you the truth, the moment you discards that cat, were it in John O’Groats or even Hampstead itself, it will be back here by nightfall, shit or bust, for I gives it a little catnip and hopium in its milk each night; it has grown accustomed to it, you see.”
Anyone who has ever fenced knows the feeling of scraping his foil tentatively along the blade of a professor of arms. There is an authority about the resistance, an especial timbre to the ring of the steel which tells the almost-good swordsman that he is paired against a master of the art.
“Good day,” I said.
“Good day, Sir. Pray call again.”
Every day the boy “You” took down the shutters at noon, having made the floor, the mahogany shop-fittings and the Delft glow, for he was, it proved, a cleanly and diligent boy. He was handy, too, for he neatly pierced for me a little Judas window in the private door, so that I could observe customers unseen. Only four came into the shop in as many days: two were dealers on the prowl, I could tell this by their casual, flickering glances. The boy told them that all the stock was spoken for, as I had instructed. One was a poor old woman with some blue-and-white to sell; it was all rubbish except for a little, sparrow-beaked jug from the English factory of Worcester, for which I gave her a few pennies.
The fourth was the person I had been praying for: the angry milord. He stamped about the shop, glaring at things and pretending, in a childish way, not to be aware of my presence. At last he picked up a small and beautiful vase and walked out of the shop with it. I made no move. He stood outside the shop holding the vase up to the sun, looking through it to see the colour of the paste. I went upstairs to make a pot of Mr Jorrocks’s tea. When I came down the lord was back in the shop, walking moodily up and down, whacking his boot-leg with his cane. He rounded on me.
All the Tea in China Page 5
