“Mr Lubbock!” I called clearly. He did not falter in his progress aft. I called again, louder; still he did not pause. By now he was at the break of the poop, I was just abaft the mizzen mast. I stopped, put my hands on my hips and roared “LUBBOCK!” in a voice such as I did not know I could command.
This time he stopped in his tracks, slowly turned, crouching dangerously. He waited. The moment span itself out for half an eternity. I could hear my heart knocking at my ribs.
“Lubbock,” I cried in a ringing voice, “you are a cowardly bastard!”
His face split open into an alligator-grin as he sidled to the rail, his hand outstretched for a belaying-pin.
I have already described that fight and how I won it. Afterwards I went to my cabin and lay down; as soon as my heart slowed a little I fell fast asleep, for I was not in the habit of rising early. When I awoke, towards noon, Peter was sitting on his bunk gazing at me morosely.
“Well,” I asked, grinning idiotically I suppose, “did I do the right thing?” I expected praise, admiration, but all he said was that I was a bloody nuisance for now there were but two watch-keeping officers besides the Captain, which would be burdensome to all aft.
Chapter Thirteen
Peter’s coolness, in the ensuing days, was reflected twofold by the Second, whose taciturnity changed to a complete unawareness of my presence. The Captain, too, chose to pretend that I was invisible and, when I appeared, would stump to the weather-rail and occupy himself with his telescope. It was otherwise with the common sailors of the crew: their smiles were broad and they tugged many a forelock as I strolled the deck. A proud, awe-struck Orace brought Peter and me a succession of splendid messes from the galley which made me confident that I had won the Doctor’s approval. Blanche made frequent visits to where Lubbock lay groaning in delirium, as a woman should, but there was no cause for jealousy. Once, when she passed close to me and no one was in sight, she smiled at me enigmatically and made the most delightfully suggestive moue with her wet, red lips.
When we were eating Peter would relax a little unless I brought up the subject of the duel, whereupon he would become cold and distant again. Looking back in time, now that I am in the prime of life and have purged myself of all vice and vanity, it occurs to me that he was trying to stifle in me a certain overweening self-satisfaction which he may have wrongly believed I was exuding in those days.
Despite the light airs, our great press of canvas brought us in a very few days to within sight of the island of Lin Tin. This means “Single Nail Island” but the resemblance is only apparent to the Chinese. Many things were apparent to the Chinese at the time of which I speak, things which were apparent only to them. They held this truth self-evident, for example: The Emperor, The Son of Heaven, The Dragon, bore the name Tau Kuang, which means Glorious Rectitude, and was, naturally, Lord of the World. It was serenely admitted that there were distant regions of his Empire, such as England, which had not yet been blessed with the ineffable radiance of The Heavenly Face, but this was a pardonable, childish ignorance and would be corrected when we grew old enough to learn. (This was comparable with the splendid common sense of the British Empire-builder when confronted with cannibalism and the feeding of worn-out old ladies to the crocodiles: get the beggars to understand hut-tax and road-making first, civilisation will follow. It was the missionaries who spoiled things with their prudery and prurience; to this day they cannot understand that making black women cover their breasts rehearsed the Fall – the key passage is at Genesis 3 vii – nor can they see that assuring the base savage that he is the equal, not only of his witch-doctor but also of his District Commissioner, is a source of bewilderment to the savage, resentment to the witch-doctor and a great nuisance to the D.C. I digress, but informatively: learn, learn.)
Our baseness – that of us Western Ocean Barbarians – was controlled by forbidding us to address anyone but the merchants of the Hong, or Ko’Hong, a venal body of contractors who purchased concessions to trade with us from the Hai Kwan Pu, a relative of the Emperor (who had in turn bought his unpaid but immensely lucrative appointment) and whose title was abbreviated in the usual, irreverent British way to “The Hoppo”.
The breath-taking absurdity of these people’s arrogance had been shown only a few years before – in 1834, I fancy – when Lord Napier himself, as Special Envoy of His Britannic Majesty, arrived at Canton and proposed to pay a visit of protocol on the Viceroy of the province. The first thing that happened was that the merchants of the Ko’Hong were terrifyingly rebuked for having allowed any person not a merchant to enter the Factories suburb. “Tremble!” the letter to them concluded, “Intensely tremble!” The next thing was that, finding it impossible to gain an audience of the Viceroy, Lord Napier sent a State Letter by his secretary to the Gate of the Petitions outside Canton. For hours this letter was proffered to one merchant or official after another, but none would touch it, for it was superscribed with a Chinese character which means “Letter”. Had it borne the character for “Petition” someone might have dared to carry it to some petty clerk in the Viceroy’s bureau. The third thing was that Lord Napier, addressed by a character which meant “elaborately nasty”, was urged, then ordered, to return to Macao.
If you find that hard to believe, read this, which is just as true. As late as 1839 a Mandarin or Commissioner called Lin Tsê-hsü wrote to Queen Victoria herself (naturally, the Celestial One could not deign personally to recognise so piddling a tributary sovereign) and rebuked her roundly for base ingratitude at the Celestial Bounty, saying that punishment for her disobedience would be, for the time being, suspended, and suggesting ways in which she could show proper submission without losing too much face. Lin, by all accounts, was a man of great intelligence; it is hard to tell whether his tongue was in his cheek and, if so, how far. But then, it is hard to tell anything about Orientals. One might say that they are the English of the East.
Perhaps the best of all illustrations of the working of their minds is the well-recorded tale of the first steam-ship to appear at the Bogue. They picked up a pilot at the Grand Lemma (the largest of the Ladrone Islands) and were taken through the island channels to the Macao Roads without the least flicker of curiosity from the pilot. Dropping him at Macao, the Captain, unable to contain himself, asked the pilot what he thought of the new system of propulsion. The latter glanced back at the funnel without interest and replied that this way of driving a ship had been invented in the Celestial Empire some thousand years ago, but had been discarded as too dirty and extravagant.
When I first heard that story I laughed immoderately. Later, I came to wonder uneasily whether the pilot might not have been speaking the truth.
This island of Lin Tin is three miles long and is occupied chiefly by a mountain of some two thousand feet. Only the anchorage has interest. The first and finest sight was an ancient ship which, had you seen it in a storm in the Southern Seas, you would have taken for the Flying Dutchman itself. It was, I was told, an old “country wallah” – teak-built in India perhaps two hundred years ago and modelled on an even earlier design. As the name suggests, these ships were for the “country-trade” only and dabbled in all sorts of trading as well as opium. This one had been on the Coast since the end of the last shipping season so, despite our digression with the typhoon, we were still the first in the field.
Apart from a swarm of egg-boats, sampans and such Chinese craft, the only other vessels in the anchorage were the receiving ships: large, dismasted hulks which were nothing more or less than floating warehouses – although from the gay awnings, the stove-chimneys, the pots of flowering plants and the strings of laundry you might have thought them floating tenements. We laid alongside one of them and a “brow” was quickly laid from our deck to one of the many entry-ports. I was loafing at the entrance of the galley when four of our men laboured up from ’tween decks bearing a makeshift stretcher. I had known that Lubbock’s wound was not healing well but was nevertheless startled at the change in
his appearance: his face was yellow and the skin stretched tightly over his bones, his hands were like claws, plucking at the light sheet which covered him and his head rolled to and fro in a horrid way.
“Why does his head wag so?” I asked the Doctor. “Is it delirium?”
“No, Maz Cleef,” he replied gravely. “I think he looking for you.” Ever ready to receive an apology and give a forgiveness, I strode towards what had been Lubbock. So soon as I came within his range of vision the horrid wagging of the head ceased, sure enough. His lips, crusted with sordor, cracked open and he croaked something inaudible. I bent over him, so as to hear what might well be his dying words of repentance.
“I am going to live, Van Cleef,” he rasped faintly, “live. Can you hear me?” I nodded, encouragingly.
“Live to make you wish you never had lived.” I started back, but not before he had spat, feebly but disgustingly, into my ear. I should have known better: people of such vileness do not change, even in the presence of death. As the men carried him to the receiving ship he was making an ugly, gasping sort of titter which no doubt sounded to him like a bellow of ribald mirth.
(There was an excellently-appointed sick-bay on this receiving ship, I was assured, and if necessary Lubbock would be carried to Macao where a neat little hospital was maintained by a Pomeranian medical missionary called Gutzlaff who was one of only two Europeans who could speak, read and write the Chinese tongue and whose nimble intellect was able to reconcile the creation of twenty million opium addicts with the opportunity to distribute Protestant Bibles and Cockle’s pills. This Prussian Christian and Lubbock deserved each other.)
Then our chests of opium were brought up and flowed into the receiving ship. Our schroff, and the grand schroff on the larger vessel, made a show of marking off each chest but there was little need: pilfering was unknown in that otherwise dishonest trade. Captain Knatchbull went, in his good uniform, to pay calls on old acquaintances aboard the receiving vessel, taking his comprador, servants and both remaining watch-keeping officers with him for the look of the thing.
The air of Lin Tin must have been sovereign, for Blanche’s headache vanished like the dew upon a Dutch tulip as soon as we were alone together.
When the party returned after several hours – none too soon for me because the heavy climate was not conducive to prolonged lessons in venery, such as Blanche loved – the Captain’s face was long and glum. Although we were the first at Lin Tin the Chinese were confident that other and larger vessels would soon be at the anchorage and therefore they would pay no more than an average of £185 per chest of the drug, the poorer grades making up for the better. (At Namoa we had taken an average of £210 per chest although the overall quality we had sold there had been lower.) Why, then, had we not sold all at Namoa? For one thing, the country trade, so early in the season, although glad to pay high prices to satisfy a craving market, had not the resources to buy large quantities until their retail profits came in. More important, each ship had to sell a plausible quantity of the drug at Lin Tin in order to keep the mandarins, the Hong merchants, the Hoppo (all of whom, of course, took large, illegal commissions on each transaction) and even the proprietors of the receiving ships, content.
To my surprise, we did not stay at Lin Tin to deal but set sail the next morning for Whampoa, the official unloading port, thirteen miles below Canton. It was explained to me that the people of the receiving ship would deal for us capably and honestly.
At Whampoa an absurd Chinese official, calling himself the port doctor, came aboard to give us “pratique”. This means that such an official should satisfy himself that there are not, and have not recently been, any cases of infectious disease aboard. In practice it meant that there was a long and bitter argument as to how much he would take to go away.
The cargo we unloaded there into crab-boats was scarcely plausible as the entire contents of a ship’s hold: the rhinoceros horns and elephant tusks, a few bags of American ginseng (which the Chinese prized more than their own) a few tiger- and leopard-skins, a small but valuable box of tigers’ whiskers, some furs and woollen goods and, for the European community, liquor, letters, journals, books, hats, corsets and the like. There would of course be no comment on the paucity of our cargo – everyone understood perfectly that the bulk of it had been discharged elsewhere.
Leaving in the John Coram only the Second (now acting-First) Mate, Blanche and a handful of teetotallers as skeleton crew, the rest of the ship’s company followed the goods up the Pearl River to Canton, or rather to that suburb where the Factories were permitted to exist. (Why they were called “Factories” is a mystery to me for nothing was manufactured there but profits.) Long before we reached the Factories, however, we seemed to be in a city upon the water: I swear one could have walked for a mile at least across the tightly-packed boats without the least risk of a wetting. The racket and the stench were quite enervating. Our Chinese boatmen pointed our craft into a narrow alley between these floating houses, stowing the oars and using paddles and, finally, boathooks to squeeze a passage. I was gazing entranced at a wonderful houseboat full of charming young ladies when Peter nudged me. “Canton,” he said, pointing. There it stood; a grim, thirty-foot wall, each side more than a mile long and pierced by imposing gates.
“They say there are more people inside those walls than in London,” said Peter. “Add the population of the suburbs and of this water-city and the number cannot be much less than two millions.” Much impressed by this, for large figures always make me think of money, my eyes nevertheless strayed back to the houseboat of the young ladies. It was a splendid building – wonderfully carved and gilded balconies with intricate railings sprouted from every part of it and each balcony held a richly-clad young lady or two, whispering, tittering and nodding at us.
“Calm yourself, Karli,” said Peter, drily, “they are forbidden to admit you onto the Flower Boats.”
“Then why are they at such pains to make themselves attractive?”
“ ‘Nightee time come’,” he replied enigmatically.
“Which means?”
“It is a pidgin-English phrase of wide application: it means that, after dark, officials cannot see regulations being broken.”
“Then …?”
“No, Karli. Below decks in that boat of sin there are quite half a dozen burly pimps. If you ventured aboard you would, at the very best, be beaten and robbed but, more likely, you would never be seen again. Small parcels of you, neatly wrapped, would be thrown overboard when the tide was running. If you must sample Chinese womanhood, contain yourself until we are back at Whampoa, where there are many complacent and hygienic young persons of fine quality. But I warn you, anything you may have heard about the, ah, eccentric arrangements of the Chinese women’s anatomy is simply one of those ‘bouncers’ with which sailormen love to tease landsmen. They are exactly like English women in that area.”
“Oh,” I said, a little put out, for I had been looking forward to making love on a T-shaped bed.
“But somewhat smaller,” he added thoughtfully, “although whether this is due to the application of alum-water I cannot say.”
At that moment we bumped, at last, at the foot of the landing stairs to the English Factory’s garden. In front of us, across an elegant shrubbery and garden, rose a flagstaff from which bravely waved the Union Jack. Over to the left, two more flagstaffs bore the flags of France and the United States of North America.
Meanwhile, our Captain’s face was darkening with anger as the schroff bickered with the boatmaster over the price of our passage. This darkening or scowling arose from the evident fact that the schroff was having difficulty in making himself understood; he had done well at Namoa for his native tongue was Foo-Kien, but his command of Cantonese was clearly not as perfect as he had claimed. At last a bargain was struck and we poured off the boat and into the garden. At the top of the stairs my heart leaped up, for to my right, over a high wall, I saw the flag of Holland herself.
&nb
sp; All the Factories were curiously dignified in a variety of European styles yet all bearing an indefinable Oriental flavour. The English Factory was enormous: forty yards wide and one hundred and forty yards deep, a maze of courtyards, treasuries, state reception rooms and even a church. It was as self-contained as a monastery.
Each of the common crewmen was now issued a small advance of pay: enough to buy a few trinkets and to become drunk for just less than the length of time we were to remain there. They were strictly enjoined to stay in parties of not less than five, each party to include, and be governed by, a senior rating who was familiar with the perils of the place. The boatswain “Tommy Pipes” was to make these arrangements. Finally, the Captain vowed that he would severely fine any man who allowed himself to be murdered. To this day I am not certain whether he meant this as a joke, for he was a humourless man.
Then, before he entered the factory proper, to pay his formal calls, he turned to me and thrust a slip of paper into my hand.
“Proceeds of your share, Mr Van Cleef,” he growled. It was a brand-new draft on a Parsee bank.
I puzzled at the amount, for it represented a price of no less than £215 per chest – the price for the highest quality we had sold at Namoa. I opened my mouth to point out his error but he silenced me with a gesture.
“I sold all yours at Namoa, Mr Van Cleef. Lay it out carefully on your cups and saucers and fiddle-faddles. They’ll not rob you but you’ll not get the choicest wares unless you put on a little arrogance. That’s a word to the wise, young Lewis.”
I believe I have already suggested the reason why he had once before given me that name. He was, I suppose, not really a bad man, only sad and mad; this is like having a broken leg inside your brain – no splints can be applied and, since there are no physical signs, you get no sympathy nor any kindly nurses.
All the Tea in China Page 21
