Thanks be to God – any God who chances to be thumbing through this essentially moral tale – our water-casks had become impossibly foul and so full of animalcules that even these iron-livered North Country men could not drink it, so our Captain put in to the Gran Canaria, at the mole called Las Palmas, so as to complete with water and, no doubt, bargain for more beasts of canonical age. For my part, I laid out a guinea on fresh fruit, a crock of butter, certain crusty loaves and a long, hard garlic sausage. I kept an eye open for the young person I had met there on my outward voyage – how long ago it seemed! – not with any lust in my heart, for I was now a married man and, moreover, too undernourished – but simply to reproach her for the infestation she had ungratefully rewarded me with and to press upon her a cake of the incomparable mercury soap. She was not to be seen; I like to think that she was in the confessional box.
This sausage, coupled with these fruits – I speak figuratively, of course – so restored our well-being that before we weathered Ushant I found myself once again able to reassure Blanche of the vigour of my devotion towards her; this, in turn, gave us both the appetite to warm ourselves in the increasing cold by eating a little of the hot and greasy messes of the Captain’s table, which now proved less offensive than they had seemed in the Tropics.
Nonetheless, it was with a great gladness that we heard the anchor-chain crashing through the hawse-hole in London River and our thanks and farewells to the Captain and his officers were, I fancy, not much more than perfunctory.
I had pasted great labels on my chests of porcelain, bearing the words “BRITISH MUSEUM”, and these, along with a sudden inability to speak anything but the most broken English, soon cleared me and our goods through the customs with no more than a half-sovereign tactfully laid out here and there. The cases, I, and Blanche were soon on a tax-cart, bumping towards St Botolph Lane. At Mr Jorrocks’s warehouse we were greeted by the M.F.H. himself. He peered at me amazedly, cried “Dash my vig!” from a full heart and indeed pulled off the very wig itself and dashed it upon the grocery-encrusted floor.
“Never hoped to see you alive again, Mr Dutch, my dear young cock! And wot’s this, wot’s this? Your lady wife? Charmed, I’m sure: ‘none but the fair deserves the brave’ as Nimrod himself has said. You shall come home with me this werry hinstant to meet Mrs J., who I do not doubt will find some scrap of a snack to furnish us out until dinner-time.” We did so. Mrs J. burst into tears at the sight of me: for a moment I feared that she would fold me to her bosom. Luckily, Mr Jorrocks presented Blanche to her at that moment, so that it was Blanche who received the enfolding, the kindly, copious tears and the maudlin sayings of “there, there” and “you poor thing, you,” etc., while Mr Jorrocks and I stole away to where the good, strong Marquess of Cornwallis lay in black bottles under the dining-room sideboard.
I did not see Blanche again until dinner, when she plied almost as lusty a knife and fork as I did, for she had rested, you see. It was a frugal dinner, Mr Jorrocks explained, because we were but four at table and there had been no time to arrange “made dishes”. A tureen of gravy-soup and a stuffed pike were “removed” by a round of boiled beef at one end of the table and a crown-roast of mutton at the other; the corner dishes were but a brace of green geese and another of Aylesbury ducklings; nevertheless, we fared well for we were used to worse, and the black puddings, ragoût of kidneys and pigeon pie which came with the sweet things as second course were barely touched.
When the women had retired to drink those potent, sticky drinks which women drink in drawing-rooms, Mr Jorrocks fetched out two decanters of a port which he himself had only once before broached, he vowed. The two decanters were because he professed himself too old and tired to push decanters the length of a table: it was easier to have one each. It was capital port. Later, Blanche and I slept between lavender-scented linen sheets, smothered luxuriously in feather beds. There was never so happy a man as me that night and Blanche, too, gave every sign of contentment with her lot.
There was, of course, no question of taking such another little shop as I had once kept – so many centuries ago, it seemed – near Strand Street and the Convent Gardens Cabbage Exchange. In those days I had been but a poor, ignorant Dutch Jew; I was now a rich, ignorant Dutch Jew, for I owned the finest stock of porcelains in Europe as well as the modest amount of gold I had thoughtfully rescued from the specie-room of the John Coram. For running expenses I went to a Dutchman in Hatton’s Garden – which is a street, not a garden at all, and where you could linger a week without hearing a word of English spoken – and sold my splendid baroque pearl. I was robbed, of course, robbed, but £485 (plus a sovereign with which to buy sweet-meats for my non-existent children) shewed a good profit on my purchase price from the base of the base Indian, and in any case it has always been my philosophy to leave a profit for the next man.
Not only had I to seek out a more grandiose shop but also one with elegant living-quarters, for I now had a wife and, as everyone knows, wives require drawing-rooms, water-closets and many another fal-lal and folderol. At last we found an ideal place: Mr Jorrocks advised me that an acquaintance of his (“for ‘friend’ vould be stretching the Henglish language a leetle,” he said) had recently gone to Queer Street. This “Queer Street” is an affectionate term used by Londoners to denote Carey Street, where the Commissioners in Bankruptcy sit magisterially the live-long day, striving to teach debtors and creditors to live together in amity. It is a strange, British institution and many a fortune has been founded by prudently resorting there. I have heard it said that a sensibly-planned bankruptcy can be as profitable as a well-insured fire.
Be that as it may, Mr Jorrocks’s acquaintance, a Mr S. Sponge, had “failed” in his business, which was called the SPONGE CIGAR & BETTING ROOMS, by advertising that he had £116,500 to lend at three and one half per centum – a madness which only a Gentile could perpetrate.
The cigar divan, which we went to inspect that very day, was furnished in the most gentlemanly taste: replete with crimson plush, gilt plaster simulating carved wood, ottomans in bottle-green velvet; red mahogany and crystal chandeliers: one might have thought oneself in Waddesdon itself. It was going for a song and I snapped it up in a trice; that is to say, after little more than three hours’ bargaining with the agent for the creditors. It was situated in a quiet, not too dirty little street called Jermyn which runs parallel to the unfashionable end of Piccadilly (where the more genteel whores ply their trade) and is in the Parish of St James’s. But why do I tell you this, for have I not often taken you to see where our House was founded, and where it throve until, needing more space, I bought the Duke’s house at the Corner of Hyde Park?
The upstairs apartments were spacious and elegant for such a seedy neighbourhood and Blanche declared herself well pleased. Then, at her insistence, we went a-shopping. Our first call was at the Foundling Hospital, where I bought another bastard, explaining that Orace had ungratefully run away to sea. The new boy seemed sturdy, willing and with clean fingernails. He was happy to leave the Hospital, for his work there was to scrub floors for ten hours each day, except on Saturdays when he was leased out to a “Sabbath goy”, who is a man who contracts to light fires for orthodox Jews on that day and to do other tasks forbidden in Leviticus.
I was generous with Blanche and I am bound to admit that she laid out the money well on bedding, furnishings, wall-papers and clothes for herself. Her taste in drawers, stays and smocked petticoats I found exquisite and she discovered an innate gift for removing them in my presence in the most charming way. It was interesting to observe that, as her store of finery increased, so did her saltiness; indeed, there were nights when even I was hard-pressed to match her salacious inventiveness. I believe it was at about that time that I bought her, as a sentimental present, a charming little terrier-whip, the lash bound with green velvet and a silver fox’s head on the handle. She had, it proved, not quite out-grown such toys.
I think that, on the whole, I am glad that I sh
all never understand women. There are some areas of knowledge which we men are better without.
My mother had sent, in care of Mr Jorrocks, a couple of chests of excellent Delft and other wares; these, along with some of the less important items from my cases of Chinese porcelains, furnished forth the still-shuttered windows of my new establishment against the day when I should open for business and astonish the London connoisseurs.
There came a day when the new clothes which I had ordered were delivered and the modest, but not quite tradesmanly, carriage was promised for the morrow. I sent a note to Lord Windermere craving, in a dignified way, permission to wait upon him the following day. The note came back with a scribbled. “Pray do, but you’ll find me bedridden” on it.
Before this visit, something upsetting happened: when signing the papers for the new bastard I had noted that his first name was “Hugh” and had, accordingly, been addressing him as “Hooch”. He came to me and explained, most respectfully, that this name was in fact pronounced “You” in English. I was quite taken aback and told him that this would never do. He admitted to owning a second name – Thomas – and we agreed on this – an excellent name for a bastard.
When the new carriage, drawn by a fine half-bred Hackney bay, was delivered, Tom walked around it in the most knowledgeable way and gentled the horse like any ostler (which is short for oat-stealer, of course). He shyly claimed that he knew how to drive such a conveyance and I allowed him, with some trepidation, to prove his skill. He was, indeed, gifted in the art and I sent out forthwith for a suitable hat and leggings for this capable little dandi-prat.
That afternoon, I found Lord Windermere in a piteous state. It appeared that, some few nights before, he had drunk two bottles of port more than was his wont and had awakened in the night with the frightful kind of thirst which will drive a man to drink water. He had made his own way to the butler’s pantry and drunk quite a pint of the stuff. Now, everyone knows that to drink the water of London is to invite disaster, and disaster had indeed descended upon his essential tripes: one could hear them gurgling like Fleet-ditch. He perked up considerably when I produced the little present I had brought him from China: a minute, exquisite scribe’s screen in the purest mutton-fat jade and a matching brush-pot in the most unflawed spinach-colour; a colour only to be found in the fabled Jade Mountain which lies somewhere in Shan-Si, is guarded day and night and whose location even the Celestial One has not been told.
He was right to prize this present, for old Jim Christie would have squeezed out quite a hundred guineas for it in his auction rooms. But Windermere was no fool and knew that I too was nothing of the sort.
“Uncommon kind of you,” he murmured, just audible over the Vesuvian noises from his innards, “uncommon kind. Dare say you’ve something to sell me, eh? Eh?”
I explained to him that, amongst my new season’s stock, I had the incomparable ox-blood piece, bought in Canton, which I have spoken of before, and that I could not exhibit it publicly because no true connoisseur would have eyes for anything else in my shop if it were there; I had to be rid of it, even at a sacrifice. Windermere’s eyes glazed with disinterest as he stared abstractedly at a corner of the painted bedroom-ceiling, where some precocious cherubs were disporting themselves in adult ways. I uttered, in a flat voice, some seven more words describing the piece. His eyes remained disinterested but I was watching the quickened respiration of his chest.
“How much?” he asked, languidly.
I told him. He sat bolt upright.
“Oh, burst and rot me!” he cried in a frenzy. “If I’d not the squitters already I’d have ’em now! Are you insane?”
“I do not think so,” I said carefully, “except, perhaps, in the matter of women.”
“Pull the bell-rope!” he yelled. “No, not that one, the other: I need a bedpan, not the butler.”
When I re-entered the room, some minutes later, an effete and pallid Windermere begged me to trifle no more with a man trembling, as he was, on the edge of the very grave.
“What’s the real price?” he asked. “Come now, the real one, eh? Damme, you’ve had your joke, turned me bowels inside out, let’s talk sense now. Guineas. Things like that.”
“Lord Windermere,” I said, gravely as any high-priced doctor, “the real price would blench the cheek of anyone but Nathan Meyer Rothschild” – I repeated this name carefully – “but the price I named to you was but a token of friendship, you understand.”
He ranted a little but used no language more dirty than was customary with him. At last, sulkily, he said that he would look at the pot.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Today, if you will forgive me, your eyes are a little tinged with bile and not perfectly able to appreciate the colour of this piece. So, until this time tomorrow, my Lord… ?”
“Very well,” he rasped in tones of defeat. “On your way out, tell that woman to bring the bedpan again – and tell the butler to give you a glass of whatever you please. I can recommend the water, heh heh.”
There is a peculiar pleasure in knowing that you have made a sale before the customer has seen anything but the price.
Chapter Twenty-One
I sprang out of bed the next morning with a song on my lips and the world at my feet. Blanche had, during the night, given me yet more proof of her talents and inventiveness in the field of love and had shyly promised to surprise me deliciously, next bed-time, with a truly remarkable piece of naughtiness which she had been saving up for a special occasion. Moreover, I was rich; I had a glistering new carriage, a splendid emporium ready to startle London with, an ensured sale to Lord Windermere that evening which would bring enough to keep an unambitious man for life and – here I rubbed my hands with glee – Mr Jorrocks was bidden for dinner at two-thirty sharp and I had arranged such a feast as would daunt even his magnificent appetite. He had made me cry “capivi” at the Margate breakfast and I had long thirsted for revenge. At this dinner I meant to make him repeat the legendary episode when he had had to beg his friends to lift him up, tie him into his chair and fill his glass.
There was a barrel of oysters dripping in the cellar; an incredible salmon with the sea-lice still clustering on it, brought express from the sandy deserts of Wales itself; a tureen of soup made from a prodigious turtle, the gelatinous meat and gobbets of green fat swimming so thickly in it – both calipash and calipee – that it was a puzzle to find the liquor; Aylesbury ducklings as big as geese; half of a stag’s bottom cooked in pastry and many another kickshaw – but the prime remove, the dish to defeat even Mr Jorrocks, was a round of boiled beef. Plain fare, you say? Ah, but this round of beef was from an ox among oxes, an ox which would have made an elephant cringe; moreover, it had been dressed according to the receipt of Signor Francatelli, the pupil of Carême himself and the new chef de cuisine to her new Majesty. The receipt alone had cost me a guinea and now, as I write (when I have to count every penny so that I can leave a substantial sum to the Foundling Hospital), it makes me shudder to think of the cost of the cocks’-combs, palates, crayfish and other rarities which were called for. (I shall perhaps append the receipt to this memoir of mine, but I know how you love these little legacies en souvenir.)
It was, then, a wonderfully happy Van Cleef or Mortdecai who sat down to dinner that afternoon.
“Wot a werry helegant little repast, Mr Dutch,” said Mr Jorrocks, as oyster after oyster flew down his throat. “Can’t take my eyes off that salmon. Yes, pray help me, do.” A little later: “Vy, wot’s this? Haven’t seen finer turtle soup on the Lord Mayor’s table, swears I don’t know where you gets it, unless you’ve a friend in the Mansion House.” And so it went on without a flaw or pause in the arrangements; Tom was trotting to and fro with fresh plates and more bottles, Blanche was beaming and winking at me and old Mrs Jorrocks’s great red face was steaming with pleasure as she gobbled.
I passed the ox-blood Ming bowl around as a loving-cup, filled with champagne, then the round of beef was brought in with grea
t éclat. I begged Mr J. to take the honours of the carving-knife and he had heaped every plate before he dropped, from a full mouth, the words which were to change my life.
“Almost forgot, Mr Dutch. A person came to the varehouse on Friday, claimed to be a friend of yours.”
“Really?” I said, from an equally full mouth. “Did he give a name?”
“Believes he did. Elderly, skinny chap, brown in the face, werry short of teeth and a little the worse for liquor. Ragged pea-jacket buttoned up to the neck to hide his no-shirt, but spoke like a gent – and I means the genuine harticle.”
“I do not think I know anyone of that description, Mr J.,” I said, reaching for another oyster or two to help the beef slip down. “Do you recall the name?” This question seemed to have the most alarming effect:
“Fetch my hat, Binjamin!” he roared over his shoulder. I gaped.
“Surely, Mr J., you’re not going?” asked Blanche, distressed.
“Going, going; vy should I be going just ven my happetite is properly tickled? No no, just wants my hat, lid, tile – calls it Golgotha, ‘place of the skull’ you know, haw haw! – it’s my portable scrutoire.”
He fumbled in the lining of the great beaver and after turning out a raffle of bills of exchange, promissory notes and notices of the meetings of fox-dogs, finally found and handed to me a scrap of paper with his great blotted scrawl on it. The words were “P. Stenegave DA PM”.
I shall not pretend that the oyster turned to ashes in my mouth: such extravagances are bred only in the heated minds of female novelists, but I recall that I gulped at the little bivalve with some difficulty, for it was clear that, against all odds, my dear messmate Peter was alive.
So intense was my emotion that I found it difficult to speak until I had emptied my plate and Mr J. was refilling it.
“Yes, please,” was what I said, “and a few of those cocks’-combs and other tid-bits, if you please. Thanks. By the bye, what does ‘DA PM’ mean?” He inserted his fork under his wig and scratched reflectively. “Can’t say as I recalls now,” he said, wiping it on his napkin (the fork, not the wig), “but ‘PM’ must signify ‘post meridgium’ or afternoon, must it not? My vord, ’ow beautifully laced this beef is with delicate yellow fat, thinks I’ll take a touch more. ‘Well bred, well grown, well killed, well ’ung, well bought and well-dressed’ as the old King used to say. Ah yes, ‘DA’ signifies the place where you might find this hacquaintance of yours. Yes, that’s it, ‘Dirty Annie’s’ is the place he named. Any afternoon, or p.m. Vould have said he was a longshoreman, shy of the price of a pot of ale, but for ’is woice.”
All the Tea in China Page 29
