“Wot?” he cried, dexterously trapping the last fourth of a muffin from my defeated plate, “Wot? ’Ave I made you cry ‘capivi’, my young prize-fighter? Vell, it’s nothing to be ashamed of; ask anyone in the Surrey ’Unt vether they’ve ever seen John Jorrocks outfaced when his knees are under a breakfast-table. Indeed, you’re the finest contender I’ve ever squared up against … consider Mr York, there,” and he pointed with his triumphant fork to a pallid apparition in the coffee-room doorway, “consider him, I say. I’ll wager you a hat – a guinea hat, not a 6/8d Goss – that he can get down no more than a pint of porter and a pair of ripe bloaters!” The apparition turned greenish and vanished.
“There you are!” he cried, “Wot did I say? Wot is ’appening to the youth of Old England when a slight breakfast daunts them? Where are the ’earts of hoak? Waiter, pray fetch me a few more of these capital prawns and another slice of that delicate Cambridge brawn, for I vows that my muffin-mill is almost stopped – needs hoiling – and I have promised Mrs J. that I shall not eat butter, lest I spoil the trimness of my figure.”
“Do you stay here long, Mr Jorrocks?” I asked, with some trepidation.
“Vy, no; I and Mr York came but to stay a five pound note in Margate this delightful weather (plus eighteenpence vich Mr York furnished) and it is now all but spent. We leaves on the steamer at eleven o’clock sharp.”
I summoned the waiter and asked for my bill. Mr Jorrocks took it from me but not, as I had hoped, to settle it. He took out a silver pencil-case and scrutinised the slip of paper carefully.
“Wot did you use by way of candles?” he asked.
“One,” I said. “For perhaps five minutes.”
“Imperence!” he cried, scratching out the item on the bill. “Now, ‘hearly call in the morning’?”
“Well, I do not think so.” He scratched some more.
“Wails for the vaiter – left blank.”
“Vails?”
“Perquisites, honorariumbs, tips as the bagmen call ’em.”
“Ah, I see. A shilling, do you think?”
“Fourpence is werry ample.” He scratched again. “And the chambermaid?”
“I think,” I said carefully, “that she has already been availed.” He handed me back the bill and I made great show of rummaging in all my pockets to find enough silver to make up the sum.
“My word,” said Mr J. as I rummaged, “I believe I am getting oldish. I fancy a true fork-breakfast would have made a stiff ’un of me. It’s all werry well for you great Dutch cormorants but I has a thriving warehouse and a great red-faced wife to see to.” I did not understand but I made polite noises as I gathered together the amount of the bill.
“See here, young spadger,” he said, presently, “if you should be a little short of tin, by vich I means swag; since I have taken a fancy to the way you can deal with your prog, by vich I means your wittles, pray come and spend a night or two at Great Coram Street. Mrs J. vill be delighted to see you” – his voice lost a little conviction at this point – “and you shall have a h’aired bed, good wear and tear for your teeth and all that sort of thing found you. Pray do me this kindness, do. The steam-packet leaves at eleven prompt and it will be strange if I cannot persuade the Captain to take your chest of tea-cups aboard, although he has no cargo-bottomry.”
I found this puzzling. First, I had been assured that the British were not an hospitable folk. Second, I was well aware that this day was the Sunday.
“But today is Sunday,” I said, diffidently. “Is it thought proper here to make so long a journey on this day?”
He chuckled fatly.
“My dear young sir,” he said, “in England ve sees no more sin in taking a journey on a Sunday than in cheating one another on the Monday!”
“Mr J., I cried, “I feel that I have come home.”
“Werry obliged,” he said, “I’m sure. Now, pack your traps and we’ll retrieve your box of ware from the shipping-shed, for there’s little enough time left before the steamer commences its wulgar ’ooting.”
Indeed, by the time that I had made a small, sentimental farewell to the little chambermaid, packed my traps, met Mr Jorrocks on Margate’s far-famed jetty and struck a bargain with two surly longshoremen over the movement of my chest of Delft into the steamer, the ’ooting was, indeed, becoming urgent. It was a beautiful steamer, named the Royal Adelaide – after the Queen before this one, you understand – painted magnificently in pea-green and white; flags flying, decks swarming with smart bonnets and bodices: I had never seen anything so fine. Well might Britannia rule the waves; I felt my heart swelling with new-found patriotism, for I am easily moved.
Mr Jorrocks and I found a corner of the deck on which to settle; our various possessions firmly ensconced beneath our bottoms. He was nursing on his lap a great wicker hamper, at which I stole a glance once in a while.
“Prowisions,” he said, patting the lid. “Breakfast is all werry well but – ’ow keen the sea air is! I ’ave brought but a knuckle of weal, half a ham, some genuine Dorking sarsingers (made in Drury Lane), a few plovers’ eggs and some sherry white. Yes, and I believe some chickens. Werry acceptable they’ll be before we gets to the Savoy Stairs, you may depend upon it.”
He was right, I have never met a man of so much acumen. The sea air was, indeed, keen, keen. The knuckle of weal and the other little snacks were, indeed, welcome. I gained, I think, his respect, by agreeing that he should have the last chicken if I might have the last few plovers’ eggs.
There was a sort of orchestra on the steamer, comprising one flute, one lute, one long and one short horn, also a harp played by a fat lady in a puce gown. They played quadrilles and other things to which I could not master the steps but it was pleasing to be taught them by young ladies who giggled. One of the young ladies had a gentlemen friend who tried to hit me with his knuckles. I made his nose bleed. When I lifted him up and apologised, he tried again to hit me and I had to make his nose bleed afresh.
“’E wos a beauty before you put the paint on!” cried the young lady, still giggling.
“’E is an uncommon fine young warbler,” said Mr Jorrocks gravely, “now where shall we turn for a song?”
In default of the young gentleman with the bloody nose I sang a song in my own language, then, emboldened, another, with words which I was tolerably sure no one on board would understand. After this, I was besieged with more lessons in dancing by other and more desirable young ladies; at least one of which, I fancy, took place behind a ballast-box, but I forget, for I am old now, old.
Part Two
THE GREAT AND SINFUL CITY
Chapter Four
As we chugged up London River the wind shifted and I wrinkled my nose in puzzlement for suddenly the air was full of a stifling stench of horses. I remarked on this to Mr J., who sniffed the breeze appreciatively and told me that this was the very scent of London itself. “More ’osses to the square mile than anywhere helse in the civilised world,” he told me. “You’ll soon be relishing it as the homeliest smell in the world.”
I found this hard to credit at the time but there is no doubt that within a very few days the stench became first inoffensive, then unnoticeable. It took me longer, fresh as I was from cleanly Holland, to reconcile myself to the human odours which reeked from every street-kennel.
Too soon the dancing on board stopped and there was a frantic search for children and other parcels as we drew up to London Bridge.
“Ease her! Stop her!” bellowed the Captain. “Now, Sir, yes, you Sir, in the wherry! Are you going to sleep there?”
Within a little while my chest of ware was on a tax-cart – an open, one-horse, farmer-like vehicle without springs – and Mr Jorrocks and I were following in a hansom cab to his warehouse in St Botolph-Lane, where my Delft was to be stored for the time being and where Mr Jorrocks hoped to catch his work-people napping.
“My vord!” he said contentedly as we jolted and trundled through the evil-smelling streets –
“Easy over the pimples, barber!” he cried once or twice in his jocose fashion – “My vord, I wows I feels mightily refreshed of my jaunt, quite renowated: as fresh as an old hat after a shower of rain! But I fears there is nothing liquid left in the hamper and my gullet is dry as a bone.”
“Shall I ask the cabbie to stop,” I asked anxiously, “so that I can find you a drink of water?” He looked at me strangely.
“Water! Haven’t surprised my stomach with a drink of water for fifteen years and that was a haccident, for I thought it gin. ’Ave you seen what water does to boot-leather?”
“And perhaps,” I murmured diffidently – my first essay at an English joke – “perhaps it might rust your iron constitution?”
“Haw, haw, haw!” he bellowed, slapping my thigh quite painfully, “Werry good indeed, Mr Dutch, werry good indeed. Owes you one for that, owes you one!”
I blushed and sweated with pride.
“Cabbie!” shouted Mr Jorrocks, pulling a little string which was designed to attract the cab-driver’s notice, “Cabbie, I say, pray stop at the Cock and Pullet when we gets there, for my young friend is feeling poorly. Yes, and you shall have a fancy four for yourself, in course, and a quart of stale vollop for your old screw, vich might have been a ’unter once, judging by his rat-tail.”
This bore no relation to the English Language I had so sedulously learned at school, but the dissipated driver understood every word: he whipped up his sad nag and soon grated his wheels against a kerbstone at what Mr J. called “the werry spot”.
I was puzzled that the “Cock and Pullet” was called, on its signboard, the “Mother Redcap”. There we “baited” ourselves on sausages and salt herrings, washed down with a basin of new milk infused with “sticking-powder” – which proved to mean rum. I had never drunk rum in this way before. It was very good and stunk most agreeably.
We left soon, although the salt herrings, too, were good, because I was concerned about my case of Delft, although Mr J. assured me that no one in all London dared deliver goods clumsily at his warehouse.
In view of the respect with which he was treated by one and all, I had prepared myself for a palatial emporium with vast mahogany counters and liveried flunkies bowing at the head of a great flight of marble stairs. I did not in those days understand about Britain, still less about London which is almost a separate state. (Indeed, Queen Victoria herself has to use courtesy when entering London City, so proud and strange it is!)
It was no palatial emporium: a great, grubby, slab-sided building bore, on the door-post in dirty white letters, “JORROCKS & CO’S WHOLESALE TEA WAREHOUSE”. I later learned that this a British trait, a sort of upside-down boasting: you are supposed to know where such places as Jorrocks’s are, on the principle that “good wine needs no bush”. Only the “flash bucket-shops” spend money on display at their premises; when an English tradesman wants to “put on dog” as he calls it, he spends money on his horseflesh and “rigs” – and, indeed, outside this warehouse stood a magnificent errand-cart with “Jorrocks” blazoned upon it in great gold letters, surrounded by many a coat of arms of satisfied royal persons. This conveyance was pulled by a glossy bay Hackney gelding of blood, and driven by a superb person wearing, I should think, forty pounds’ worth of livery-clothes upon his back.
“I daresay I shan’t catch the warmints,” said Mr Jorrocks as he leaped out of the hansom (leaving me to be cheated by the cabbie), “but venever I’m away they prig enough pewter out of the till – by pewter I means cash – to take their lasses to the Sadler’s Wells theatre at the werry least, damn their teeth and toenails.”
Inside, the warehouse was, to a Dutch eye and nose, disgusting. (We Dutch are a cleanly folk and the British at that time were still famous for their dirtiness. Now, as I write in this bad first year of the Twentieth Century, they have taken to scrubbing themselves and their houses but half a century ago, when all this took place, they had no such notion.)
The floor of the warehouse, huge, gloomy and dingy, was covered with dirt quite half an inch deep and seemed to be sown, as though for planting, with rice, currants, raisins, cardamoms and many another grocery.
Mr Jorrocks snuffed the air appreciatively.
“The werry scent of British commerce!” he cried. “Where would the vorld be without it?” I did not remark that we Hollanders, too, were arranging our affairs quite well, for in those days I was a civil youth, supple to my elders.
He darted towards a sort of office, like a sheep-fold, in one corner of the echoing warehouse, from which, through a couple of squares of grimy glass, he could survey all that was going on. I do not think that he found anyone prigging his pewter. I wandered here and there amongst the hogsheads, casks, flasks, sugar-loaves, jars, bags, bottles and bales and boxes, until I was quite lost, and my boots were caked with the exotic detritus upon the floor. I saw a person in his shirt-sleeves and a white apron, a brown-paper hat upon his head, leaning over a little vessel as though he had the nose-bleeds. I hurried over to him and offered assistance, but it proved to be my excellent Mr J. himself, sniffing and sipping from a tray of teacups, trying a newly-arrived consignment of teas for strength, flavour and other virtues. When he had finished he conducted me around this temple of commerce, pointing out and pricing the commodities in which he dealt until my head reeled at the mercantile wealth contained within that echoing, smelly cellar-above-ground. At last we came to the “werry backbone of the consarn” – the teas.
With many a spacious gesture he named these treasures in their great, mat-covered chests.
“There!” he cried proudly, “Red Mocho, superior Twankay, Lapsang, Souchong, Oolong (werry soothing that, will be all the go with the swells one day, had an order from a Honourable Wooster only last week) and the true Gunpowder, a tea werry hard to come by.”
“And these?” I asked, pointing to a pile of chests he had not named.
“Vell, that’s what we calls ‘Toolong’, for it is last season’s tea, unsold. A trifle long in the tooth, but none the worse for that. ‘Too long’ – you twig?”
“Haw, haw!” I cried, for I was ever a quick learner, “werry good. Owes you one for that, Mr J.!” He clapped me on the shoulder.
“Make a Henglishman of you yet!” he cried happily. “Now, these here are the werry latest, the new season’s green teas, wot I was just tasting and a werry level lot they are. Am thinking of offering the ship-captings a premium of a sovereign per ton if they can get them to me before the other merchants, for there is wicious competition to be first in the market with them and the rewards are great. Could I but vipe the eye of young Charlie Harrod I’d die content, I swears I would. But I fears all the fast brigs are more taken up with the opium trade today.”
“The opium trade?” I asked idly.
“Vy, yes. A most lucrative branch of British enterprise. ’Undreds of thousands of acres are under opium poppies in India; ‘John Company’ – by vich I means the Honourable East India ditto – positively thrives upon it. The patent medicine trade here swallows up great quantities of it and many leading citizens take it regular to sooth their stummicks. Mr Villiam Vilberforce, the tireless abolisher of slavery who died but a few years ago, took it every day for forty-five years and many a wexed nursemaid infuses a little in the baby’s milk to calm its passions. Every true-born Britisher, man, woman and child, takes, on the haverage, a quarter of an ounce per annum and that, for so precious a grocery, amounts to a great deal of tin indeed.”
I stifled a yawn. The new milk, I believe, had made me sleepy. I did not mean to be rude and Mr Jorrocks did not notice my lapse.
“Get your great dirty ’oofs out of that fruit!” he bellowed at a “light porter” who was shifting currants from a bin with a wooden shovel. “ ‘Untouched by human hand’ is wot we boasts and ‘human foot’ is hunderstood as well. I’m sure you considers yourself a human,” he added, in a kinder voice.
“Yes,” he went on, addressing me again, “hopium is a most lucrative trad
e, often thought of having a wenture in it myself but doesn’t like the risk, would prefer dipping my toes into the cow-heel and tripe trade but Mrs Jorrocks considers it low. A pity, for there’s a nice little consarn in that line going for a song not a furlong from this ’ouse.”
He became moody and jingled the change in his pockets, for this was a habit of his.
“Joe!” he shouted suddenly to his foreman, “Make up two pounds of superior black for this gentleman and one of the newest lot of green, from the lot I rated ‘Hextra’ ven I wos a-tasting just now. And see if the errand-cart is outside, or send the boy for a hansom.”
As we were jolting and jingling towards his house I recalled his words about opium trade.
“What are these risks you were speaking of, Mr Jorrocks?”
“Storm and tempest,” he replied. “Crack-brained captings. Pirates – and mandarins, who are much the same article.”
I did not understand.
“Vell, you see, the Henglish part of the trade is mostly in the hands of a few old firms which has a Nelson-hold on it and there’s no breaking into it. But John Company grows more of the weed each year and there is a great new market growing up in China: there lies the richest rewards, for the heathen will buy at any price. It is but a question of getting it to their hongs and go-downs and there’s the rub, for it is illegal by their quaint pagan laws although the sitivation is somewhat heased now that Jack Tar has won the glorious Hopium War. But the whole coast is a seething nest of pirates and immoral mandarins; the cargo is precious and the payments in bar-silver: every man’s hand is against them. Moreover, the prime rates is to be got from being the first to the Treaty Ports with the new season’s crop from the Calcutta auctions and the captings – broken Royal Navy men, most of them – fairly goes insane to outsail the others.”
All the Tea in China Page 4