All the Tea in China

by Kyril Bonfiglioli

  “Give him a case of the trade gin,” growled the Captain, “the stuff with the cayenne and tobacco-juice in it.”

  No sooner had the mandarin’s scow – now a little lower in the stern – returned to the war-junk, than all kinds of other scows, sampans and egg-boats emerged from their concealment on the shore and made towards us, pulling frantically. At the Captain’s behest, I sent a small gang of sailors below decks to fetch up, under the schroff’s supervision, exactly one hundred and forty-nine chests of the drug. These comprised nine chests of very superior Benares balls, forty cases of middling stuff and one hundred of the cheapest quality, including some of the Madak mixed with charred babul leaves and the dottles from opium already smoked. (Oddly to say, there are addicts to the drug who prefer the last: much of the virtue remains in it and is now more readily released. Strange, is it not?)

  All these chests were laid out on each side of the break of the poop just as the first of the Chinese boats came alongside. One merchant from each vessel scrambled aboard and all were welcomed with copious words from the schroff and a false, greasy smile from Lubbock. They jostled and shouldered each other with every mark of courtesy, making cackling, splashy noises as they burrowed in the chests, smelling, scratching and prodding at the opium, dabbing little spots of red pigment here and there on the woodwork and flicking similar memoranda onto the little leaves of ivory they each held.

  “Should there not be a guard over the chests?” I asked Peter anxiously. He stared at me.

  “Good God, no. These are Chinese merchants, Karli, the only honest men in the world. The word of one of these fellows would be honoured by his grand-daughter’s son-in-law fifty years from now. You could give any one of them a thousand in gold this moment; he’d give you a scrap of paper with a squiggle from his little paintbrush on it and a lick of his chop – that’s their sort of personal seal – and a year from now you could cash it on the Barbary Coast, aye, and get the accrued interest to the nearest half cent as well as a dashed good meal.”

  This seemed strange to me, for I had hitherto believed that only we Jews had such standards and such international trust. I mused. The crowd around the chests thinned out and the merchants sauntered about the deck wearing polite expressions and taking care not to appear to be impressed by the marvels of Western civilisation evident thereon. Looking back, it occurs to me that perhaps they were, indeed, not impressed. They strolled everywhere. Sailors chuckled at them and hailed them with phrases of amiable obscenity, often using the word “plick”. To each greeting the Chinamen would bow, civilly although not deeply, but their faces were masks, masks.

  “Damn it, Peter,” I said at one point, “three of the buggers are going into our cabin, don’t you see them?”

  “Karli, do you never listen to me? I’ll give you a hundred pounds for every pin or penny you have missed when they’ve gone. They only wish to sneer politely at the poverty in which we barbarians live. If one of them asked you into his house it would be yours while you were there, except that part of it ‘behind the curtain’ where the women are. If you glanced more than once at their most treasured possession – again, I except the womenfolk – it would be pressed upon you. You would have to accept it. You would never be forgiven, of course. Not for accepting it, I mean, but for looking at it more than once. Do you begin to understand?”

  I reflected a while.

  “No,” I said.

  Had I understood and believed more, in those days when I was beginning to become clever, I might have become rich more quickly. Also, perhaps, dead. (Here, though, as you perceive, I am: both rich and alive. To be alive at my great age is pleasant for I love to indulge myself with eating, drinking and, from time to time, changing my will. There was a time when I thought that Bully Lubbock’s rope’s end “starter” could make men jump; now I understand that asking one of you to deliver a note to my solicitor has a much more enlivening effect. I am sure that you do not begrudge an old man his simple pleasures.)

  After a proper interval to allow the Chinamen to exhibit their lack of interest in our ship and to make it clear that they had no vulgar, mercantile lust for our opium, the schroff passed among them, murmuring to such effect that they wandered, as if by chance, to the Captain’s cabin, there to be plied with a mixture of gin, rum and warm water which they much relished and which befitted their station in life.

  They lolled elegantly for quite half an hour, our Captain showing no sign of impatience. Then the senior of the merchants, an austere and venerable person, commenced to quack. I had been eyeing his features for some little while: the thin, implacable lips, sparsely moustached, had reminded me of the private parts of the Griqua girl I had patronised in Cape Town. When he commenced to quack, however, all fell silent. The schroff interpreted the duck-like noises as an insulting bid for the whole of the cargo at a price which would not have paid for its weight in toffee-apples. The schroff’s phrase for him was less kind than the “fat old pig” he had applied to the mandarin but, curiously, it somewhat bore out the comparison I had been making in my mind with the Griqua girl.

  The Captain was no whit nonplussed. He gazed at the decanter before him for quite a minute, then delicately placed the stopper in its neck.

  “Tell the old person,” he said at last, “that although we Western Ocean barbarians are unable fully to comprehend the delicate spice of his wit, I would certainly allow myself to unbend in merriment were not so many of his juniors – his richer juniors – present.”

  The schroff took thought, then launched into an impassioned speech in the duck-like tongue which went on and on. The Captain seemed to doze. The senior merchant studied the colza-oil lamp hanging above the table as though it were a relic of the past; something his ancestors had invented a thousand years ago and discarded immediately. A silence fell. I yawned; I was sleepy, for reasons of my own. The Captain snapped at me:

  “The diplomacy is my part, Mr Van Cleef!” Then, to the schroff, “Tell the old person that this ungifted step-child of mine comes from a country even more distant than mine and that there, because they know no better, to open the mouth widely, as though yawning, is a sign of admiration for those gifted in speech and riches.”

  The old person half-rose and half-bowed. I could do no less. I do not think my old rabbi would have rebuked me, for there are precedents for doing just so in the house of Rimmon. (Study, children, study; why do you think we support the Rebb?)

  Quacking now broke forth unstemmed from every side; the schroff took notes – bribes, too, of course – and I, having been given a secret price-list by the Captain, said both this and that from time to time and with great dignity. In a surprisingly short time all our chests had been sold and, after one last glass each of the dreadful “bug-juice”, the Chinamen left in order of seniority, becking and bowing. Their boatmen, cut-throats to a man, were then allowed aboard and these plucked out their masters’ purchases unerringly and boated them. No money had changed hands but the Captain’s mouth twitched visibly at the corners, almost as though he were on the point of smiling.

  Within an hour, a frail and filthy sampan sculled toward us, a hideous half-man propelling it and three naked infants baling for their lives the water from its rotten bottom.

  A line was lowered and a cloth bag was drawn up the side of our ship. The Captain turned to me.

  “Have you an old garment, Mr Van Cleef?” he asked. I searched my mind.

  “I have a pair of under-drawers,” I said, “which the rats have got at. I had thought of giving them to my servant-boy, since they are beyond repair.”

  “Will you give them to me, Sir?”

  “Of course,” I stammered, “but they are quite gone at the gusset of the crotch, quite gone.”

  “All the better,” he said, “all the better. Ventilation is the secret of hygiene. You will donate them to this child of nature, if you please.”

  Blushingly I sought out the small-clothes in avisandum. The Captain did not look at them, for he had been a gen
tleman once, you see; he dropped a half-handful of small copper coins into their noisome depths and tossed the parcel into the sampan. It was by way of being a gift or fee. The man was transported with gratitude.

  The parcel which the fellow had delivered was exceedingly heavy; a seaman had to help the schroff to drag it into the Captain’s cabin. There we counted it and weighed it: there were Maria Theresa thalers worn thin, slabs of bar-silver, Spanish dollars which betrayed the presence of Yanqui traders, old English spade-guineas bent in half twice and hammered into a lump, and a fragment of paper, so greasy that one could have read a gazette through it, which proved to be a draft on a Cairo bank by one of the Bonajee family, written out nine years before. In each separate sub-package within the bundle was a trifle wrapped in silk: a little lump of jade, a morsel of carved ivory or of rose quartz, the tooth of a shark. They were tokens of esteem, what O’Casey would have called “luck-pennies”. Seeing my interest, Captain Knatchbull freely gave me all of them which were not made of precious metals. I prized them more than the lost, shameful under-drawers.

  No sooner had we finished the counting and weighing but we heard a cry from the deck that various small craft were approaching us. No one save I was one whit alarmed at this news and, indeed, the craft proved to be nothing but egg-boats and sampans bringing out the promised pigs and ducks, along with hens, eggs and great store of a strange, cabbage-like vegetable much esteemed in those latitudes. Everything was absurdly dear at first asking, but the comprador, aided disdainfully by the schroff (for this was not his work), spoke so scornfully to the higglers that prices soon sank to a rocky bottom. The vendors shewed no bitterness; it was clear that they had set their prices at random, having no notion of how much we Western Ocean Barbarians might pay for the necessities of life.

  The ducks were of a size and quality which I had never before seen: the Chinese may be a godless and illiterate race but in the matter of breeding ducks they have nothing to learn from the civilised world. Peter and I “clubbed” to buy a brace of these portly fowls for our own mess and talked seriously to the Doctor about how they should be dressed for the table. Greatly learned in all the cooking modes of the Seven Seas, he offered to make us a tidbit in the Manchu fashion. One coats the duck’s feet in a sort of syrup, he told us, then persuades it to trot up and down upon the red-hot stove-top until the feet are puffed and crisp. This delicacy, he assured us, is much prized. I was interested but, having been brought up in a cleanly household, pointed out that the duck’s toenails were dirty. Peter, too, demurred, saying that he preferred to save his appetite for the bird itself. The Doctor then prepared to pluck the first bird alive: this leaves the skin more perfect, he explained, and everyone accepts that the skin is the best part of the duck. To my surprise, Peter vehemently forbade this on the grounds that it would cause the duck – this Chinese duck – discomfort! I shall never understand the English, never. The Doctor smiled indulgently and, to prove that ducks feel no pain, held it between his knees and slit its throat gently. He stroked it and murmured soft words in some strange tongue while Orace collected the blood in a cup for the gravy. The duck, indeed, seemed perfectly complacent and, when the cup was full and the Doctor set it down, it waddled a few paces, opened its beak to quack, found that it could not and died tranquilly. It was most droll; the Doctor and I laughed and laughed.

  At that moment we heard a succession of shouted orders, the thunder of sailors’ feet upon the deck and then Bucko Lubbock’s bellow of “Stamp and go!” told us that we were weighing anchor and setting sail: evidently our Captain had decided not to water at Namoa after all and had resolved to be clear of Swatow Bay before darkness fell.

  Sure enough, as soon as we were in the open sea, we found a small but favourable wind – a false foretaste of the north-east monsoon – and the watch on deck was kept busy for much of the night setting more and more sail to it and sending light spars aloft until we were pretty well “a-taunto”.

  Peter and I, too, were kept busy for a good while with the first of our ducks, served with the Chinese cabbage and a spiced sauce of oranges.

  While Orace cleared away the dishes I picked my teeth and eyed the child in a benign but critical way.

  “Orace,” I said.

  “Sir?”

  “You are a good enough boy.”

  “Sir, thankyou Sir.”

  “Your hands are always clean, despite the hazards of ship-board life. Your face, too, is spotless and I do not doubt that your ears and neck would bear the closest inspection.”

  “Sir, thankyou; I do my best to be a clean boy, as you have bid.”

  “Why then,” I asked judicially – for I was in the sententious phase of drunkenness – “why then is your shirt stained? You know how delicate a digestion I own and you are clever enough to understand the dyspeptic effect of a stained shirt upon such a digestion. Explain this negligence!”

  To my astonishment the child burst into tears. I started to say something but Peter gave me a glance of such startling authority that the words froze in my open mouth.

  “Karli,” he said evenly, “the boy’s shirt is clean. The stains are blood. Look at his face.” He crooked a finger and Orace bent his tearful face into the circle of lamplight. His nose was swollen and the nostrils crusted with blood. There was a little blood, too, at one corner of the mouth and an eye was puffed and discoloured. I was at a loss for words.

  “Who struck you, boy?” asked Peter kindly. Orace, fighting back tears, answered manfully, standing to attention. It seemed that he had fallen out of his hammock. This was a plausible excuse and I was prepared to let the matter rest, but Peter told him to turn around. In his gentle, almost womanly way, he pulled the boy’s shirt-tail out of his breeches and raised it to the arm-pits. Orace’s ribs were black and blue. I rose, outraged, and was about to shout furiously but Peter quietened me with a gesture. He did not ask the boy who had brutalised him; he only asked whether it was any of the men before the mast.

  “Oh, no, Sir!” cried the boy.

  “Very well, run along. Ask the cook for some salve for your hurts. Your master will protect you from now on, you may depend upon him.”

  When the door had closed behind the boy Peter rested his chin upon his hands. His countenance was dark and bitter. I think that I was gaping foolishly.

  “Lubbock,” said Peter, as though it were a dirty word.

  “Lubbock?”

  “Oh, God, Karli; who else? He had set his heart, if you can call it that, on a certain lady, who now, for reasons I care to know nothing about, no longer welcomes his admiration.” I looked at him sharply but he avoided my eye. “Then,” he went on, “he will have tried to sodomise your boy, part lust, part spite. He will not have succeeded, for Orace is a good boy.” Again I looked at him narrowly, again he preferred to fix his gaze on the bulkhead. “So he will now make the child’s life a hell until, in a very short time, he will go over the side. I am not exaggerating, Karli, you may take me at my word. I have seen this sort of thing before. Too often.”

  I gazed at him dully, filled with guilt and trepidation.

  “What, then, should I do, Peter?”

  “A man doesn’t tell another how to look after his servants,” he said, a little stiffly. Then, seeing my face fall, he added in a kindlier voice, “You might try altering your rather regular sleeping habits. Lubbock has the second watch, from four until eight tomorrow morning. Your boy will be up at first light – say half-past six. Why not take the air on deck at, say, half past seven? Now I must turn in. Goodnight, Karli. You will know what to do in the event: you are a better man than you believe.”

  “Goodnight,” I said.

  My new silk nightshirt afforded me no sense of luxury that night, nor did sleep come readily.

  Sure enough, I rose at the unheard-of hour that Peter had suggested. It was not cold. For some obscure reason I washed myself all over in cold water as though I were an Englishman. This had a tonic effect. I sauntered on deck. There was no one t
o be seen on the quarterdeck except the steersman, whose glazed eyes jerked from the compass-card to the leech of the sail and back to the compass-card. Two men were at the pump, watering down the deck; two more were dragging the “bear” – a large, weighted scrubbing-mat – to and fro in a drowsy fashion. The rest of the watch was clustered just abaft the fo’c’sle; they seemed to be staring up at something unpleasant. I followed their gaze. High up in the main-mast shrouds a tiny figure was picking its way even higher, clinging desperately at each hand-hold. Leaning against the halyard rail was Lubbock, a dirty smirk on his lips and the “starter” swinging like a fat serpent from his hand.

  Peter was right: I knew what to do. Cupping my hands I shouted up to the boy, “Come down at once, Orace, and get about your chores.” I had ignored Lubbock. From behind me he drawled, “I sent him aloft, Mr Van Cleef.” I ignored him still. Orace was hesitating. “Come down at once!” I shouted, “you have no business there. Come down; no one shall hurt you.”

  The nasal drawl behind me was now menacing.

  “I said I sent him aloft, mister. The little bastard was insolent to me.” I rounded on him.

  “If you have any complaints to make about my servant you may make them to me. You will not punish him, nor shall you ill-treat him. He has his duties; no doubt you, too, have yours.”

  The man stared at me, quite at a loss for the moment, as a fox might be if a rabbit cuffed him across the muzzle. His mouth opened and shut. Orace jumped the last few feet of the ratlines and scuttled between us. As he passed, the Mate’s starter snaked out between the boy’s legs, curling cruelly up at his groin. He squealed with pain and scrambled on all fours to the safety of the galley where the Doctor stood, arms folded, his face a mask. Lubbock stalked aft. My feet seemed nailed to the deck. I turned my head to the little group at the fo’c’sle: they were all looking at me curiously, not unkindly. Strangely, it came to me with great certainty that they were all recalling that I was a Jew. They knew just how Peter Stevenage would behave in such a case but they could not guess how a Jew would comport himself. This helped me. I strode after Lubbock.