“See here,” he said. “The piece I looked at the other day, the piece you dropped on the floor. Was it really rubbish?”
“No, it was worth about fifteen guineas.”
“Why did you smash it, then, eh? Come now, let’s be frank.”
“Because I am a Dutchman,” I said. “Which is like an Englishman only more pig-headed.” He stared at me for several long seconds, then suddenly began to roar with laughter, raising his head and bellowing with mirth, so that little “You” crept out of the shop in fright.
“Oh, stap me!” he cried at last, when he had finished laughing, “but you’re a cool ’un. Vewwy cool, stap me if you ain’t!”
(It was strange: I pronounced the “very” as it is spelled and as I had been taught but people of Jorrocks’s class said “werry” while gentlemen and lords, especially if they had served in the cavalry, pronounced it “vewwy”. I did not understand the English in those days. To speak plainly, they seemed all to be mad. They still seem so to me but I am now wise enough to have stopped trying to understand them.)
“Windermere,” he said, extending two fingers. I shook the fingers lightly. “How do you do, Lord Windermere,” I said. “My name is Carolus Van Cleef. Do you drink tea?”
“Tay? Tay? Depends whose it is, weally.”
“Jorrocks’s,” I said. “Of course. His new season’s superior Twankay.”
“’Pon my soul,” he said, “you are a high-flier. Man of taste, man of taste. Yes, by all means, let’s have some.”
I locked the door; we propped our behinds on the counter and drank tea.
“Now, Meneer Van Cleef,” he said, “show me something I should buy. Something choice. Rare and choice.”
“No,” I said. “For I do not know how advanced a collector you are. But I will tell you what not to buy, if you will be guided by me.”
He stared, then roared with laughter again.
“Rot me, but you’re a sportsman, damme if you ain’t!”
This was a compliment, I could tell.
“Tell you what,” he said, “tell you what, tell you what. Come and call on me this evening, see my bits of pots, drink a glass of port, eh?”
“Thankyou, Lord Windermere, but tonight I am, to speak plainly, whoring. Perhaps another night?”
Again he roared with laughter – I do not know why – cracking his cane against his boot most loudly and uttering many a strange oath. In the end we agreed upon an engagement for the following night and he left, still full of mirth, wishing me good sport and urging me not to catch anything I wasn’t fishin’ for. I do not know what that meant but it was clearly a British joke.
I dined in the Strand, eating a great many chops and a pigeon pie, then went to bed alone, for I was not, in truth, in the mood for whoring; I wanted to think. I thought a great deal that night, chiefly about the predictability, or otherwise, of mad English lords but also, a little, about opium and the way it could make surly pussy-cats trudge all the way from very Hampstead itself. I had read something of how the British Colonials had secured the best part of the North American Continent by judiciously selling Demon Rum to the Redskins; perhaps something of the sort might be happening in China with opium; it was a kinder thing to sell to the heathen for it took longer to kill them, it did not inflame them to massacres and, most of all, there were a great many more customers in China than in America.
When I at last went to sleep, my head was buzzing with ambition.
In the morning, to my great satisfaction, smart errand-carts began to arrive from the tailor, shirt-maker, boot-maker and other people with whom I had placed orders. This was good because of my engagement with Lord Windermere that night. I had ordered a blue coat very like that of Mr Jorrocks and a buff kerseymere waistcoat, too, but had stopped short of the dark-blue, stocking-net pantaloons and the great Hessian boots. Instead, I had ordered what the breeches-maker called “drab shorts and continuations” which more fitted my station in life, yet still lent a sportsmanlike relish to my outfit.
While I was trying on my new fineries, a large, fat, happy man came into the shop; I peeped at him through the peephole at the bottom of the stairs. His belly stuck out in front, so did his magnificent moustache which was of the sort the English call “walrus” but was not in fashion in England at that time. I was sure that he was either a German or a Hollander and, certainly, had some good, strong, Jewish blood in his veins. He did not mind when the boy “You” told him that I was out and that all the stock was, for the time being, spoken for; he chuckled happily and went on looking, occasionally picking up a piece and nodding, chuckling. Then he left the shop, telling “You” that he was “a good boy” and giving him a halfpenny, telling him that he was to tell me that he would see me very soon.
“You” looked at the halfpenny in his hand for a long time – I watched him through the peep-hole – then put it into the till. He was, indeed, a good boy. After a little while I stamped noisily downstairs, examined the till and made the first credit entry in the ledger.
“½d,” I wrote. Then I called for hammer and nail and solemnly nailed the coin to the counter. I said nothing to “You”, nor he to me.
When I went out that evening I bade him buy ten pennyworth of tincture of opium. I handed him a shilling.
“With the change,” I said, “you may buy yourself two fresh penny buns or, if you are sensible, three stale ones, which are better for you. If they are very stale and the baker a kindly man you might well get four.”
He looked at me as though I were kind, which was far from the truth, although not so far as it would be today.
I realised, as I climbed into the cab, that I did not know Lord Windermere’s address. The cabby however, did.
“You means the mad toff wot buys old junk?”
“That will be he,” I said stiffly.
He whipped up his mare, a fine old black who looked as though she had known better days – he called her “Beauty” although he treated her ill – and soon we pitched up at a Square called Eaton; a fine neighbourhood, one could see that it was bursting with toffs. He tried to cheat me, of course, but I had, by then, at Mr Jorrocks’s advice, acquired a copy of that inestimable work: Mogg’s Guide to 10,000 London Cab Fares.
Lord Windermere’s fine house was bursting with antiques and works of art and vertu of every description, some of them mistakes, I could see that, but all most valuable. He roared with laughter when he saw me in my new clothes, it was his way of putting me at my ease, you understand.
“Now,” he cried, thrusting a bumper of fine port into my hand, “now, let’s try you. Eh? D’you see these two pots? Uncle Henry here tells me I’ve been had, diddled. One of them’s a ringer, d’you see, not right. Wrong,” he added in the way the English explain things to foreigners.
I peered about the room for the Uncle Henry he spoke of. From a deep wing-chair emerged the large, fat, happy man who had visited my shop that afternoon. He beamed and we offered each other two fingers to shake.
“Duveen,” he said happily. “Henry Duveen. Everyone calls me Uncle Henry pecoss I look like an uncle, ja?”
“Yes indeed, Sir,” I said carefully. I liked this man but he was strong and dangerous and I was disturbed to find that my mad toff was already on friendly terms with a Dutch Jew who knew how to feel the glazes on pottery and porcelain. (Who would have guessed that I was facing the first of that great House of Duveen, that House with whom ours was to be locked in a death-grapple – and still is – for mastery of the art trade?)
I turned to the table upon which stood the pair of suspect pots. They were supremely beautiful hawthorn-pattern ginger-jars from the period when, briefly, generations of experiment, using up a thousand camel-loads of pigment from Arabia, had led to the discovery of the true Celestial Blue, the Blue of Blues.
I did not even touch the glaze with a wet finger, I simply looked at them narrowly. On one, the glaze had drawn away from the pigment during the firing, just as my mother had once told me, although
she herself had never owned such a pot.
“Will you tell me what you gave for these, Lord Windermere?” I asked diffidently.
“Six hundred guineas.”
“The genuine one is worth quite that and more by itself. As for the other, the wrong one, I will give you five pounds for it as a curiosity. Even so clever a fake as this should not be in a nobleman’s collection.”
“Done!” he cried, roaring with laughter again, “but which is which, eh? Which? What?”
I put five golden sovereigns on the table, fetched the poker from the fireplace and brought it down smartly on the bad pot, praying, as it fell to flinders, that I was right.
“Stap me!” bellowed Windermere, “oh stap me, I say! Said you were a cool card from the first – from the first! Oh, curse me, d’you never tire of smashing pots?”
“So clever a forgery,” I said solemnly, “capable of deceiving even you, should not be allowed to survive. You see, it might have fallen into the hands of an unscrupulous dealer.”
Now Uncle Henry, too, was shaking with laughter.
“Bot if you had zmoshed der right pot,” he wheezed, “Vot den, my jonge, vot den?”
“Of course,” I said modestly, jingling in my breeches pocket the few sovereigns remaining to me, “I would have given Lord Windermere the six hundred guineas. Less, of course, the five pounds.”
Windermere swept up my five sovereigns and forced them into my unreluctant hand.
“Buy a suit of duds for that little bastard you keep,” he cried. “It was well worth it to watch your face as you lifted the poker!”
He and Uncle Henry and I became firm friends that night, I think. We also became a little drunk: I recall that they had some difficulty in lifting me into my hansom, we all fell over again and again but my new coat was not damaged, only muddied.
Chapter Five
The next day Lord Windermere called to see me early in the afternoon. I was setting about a pudding which the boy “You” had fetched me in from a place nearby in the Strand. It was called “Simpson’s” and still is, for all I know. It is long since I was able to digest such a pudding, made of beefsteak and kidneys and oysters and sparrows; very good.
I offered to send out for just such another pudding for Lord Windermere but he seemed to be in no mood for eating.
“Pudding?” he cried, “pudding! Damme, you’re not eating, Van Cleef; you can’t be!”
“But in my country everyone eats a little something at this hour of the day, it is to keep our strength up. Do you not do so? Come, I have seen English gentlemen eating puddings in Simpson’s as early as half-past noon!”
His face turned a strange colour, almost as though he had the “hot coppers”, which is an English expression for how you feel at noon when you have drunk some good port the night before. When Englishmen’s faces turn strange colours you must give them tea. I made him a pot of Mr J.’s “superior black”, he drank with relish and seemed to be the better for it.
“Well, now, have you got the little merry-begot his suit of duds yet?” he asked, kicking the boy “You” up the arse in a condescending and friendly fashion.
“The suit,” I said “is even now being cut and stitched by a fellow in Tooley Street, whose daughter I happen to know.”
“Capital. Capital. Keep the little bugger warm. Got to look after the lower classes, d’you see. Don’t want a revolution on our hands, do we?”
I thought of – and emulated – William the Silent, a great Dutch revolutionary of whom it was said “while he lived he was the guiding-star of a whole great nation; and when he died the little children cried in the streets.”
“No,” I said.
“Now,” he said, handing his empty cup to “You”, whose name he seemed to have guessed, “let us do a little business, if you are not in your pig-headed vein today. Uncle Henry tells me that some of your stock is not bad and that you are too demmed smart to wob me.”
“Later, I might rob you,” I said, “but just now it would, indeed, be foolishness to do so. Uncle Henry is slim, as we say in Holland. That means, not slim around the belly but ‘slim’ in his head.” This was my second English joke but I do not think Lord Windermere twigged, for “slim” is a Dutch word. But he guffawed politely, because he could tell that it was meant as a joke.
“Don’t care about Nanking stuff,” he went on, “only the best Chinese and vewwy finest Delft. Sell me some.”
“ ‘You’,” I cried to the boy “You”, “there is some pudding on my plate upstairs. Eat it up while it is still hot, then wash the plate carefully, because it is of the best Nanking ware.”
Lord Windermere beat his boot with his cane happily, he took everything as a joke except, as I learned later, duelling with pistols, which was his third most favourite occupation and his only outdoor one for, in those days, fox-’unting was reserved for farmers, petty land-owners, tea-grocers and newly-landed people.
“Come,” he said, “sell me something, I long to own something today.”
“To be frank, Lord Windermere,” I said, “I am beginning to be a little sleepy: your port last night was strong, strong, and the pudding of steak, kidneys, sparrows and oysters has made me lazy in the head. I make you a sporting offer: for five hundred pounds you may take your pick of the stock. When you have done so, if you have picked well, for another five hundred you shall have the pick of what is in the locked cabinet there.”
He bellowed with laughter again. I love the English but would love them more if they did not make so much noise, especially when people have been drinking strong port the night before.
“Tell you what,” he cried, “tell you what, tell you what! You’re a sportsman, I can tell that: let’s trust each other; here’s a scrap of paper, I’ll exchange it for the key to the locked cabinet – and no come-backs? Shall we strike hands on it?”
I did not think very long. I was either made or ruined.
We struck hands, not the limp two fingers this time but a proper hand-shake. The key was in my hand, the paper in his: we exchanged.
“When you have made your choice,” I said, “send the boy up to me. I shall have a little folding of the hands to sleep, so that you may decide without being distracted by my chewing of the fingernails.”
On the stairs I looked at the “scrap of paper”. It was a draft on Mr Coutts’s bank for £1,250. Lord Windermere cannot have been so slim by himself – I think he had discussed things with Uncle Henry. I went to sleep, happily, in most of my clothes. One hour later “You” roused me and helped me into my coat, which he had brushed nicely, and I went downstairs. I looked at what Lord Windermere had chosen, which was all laid out on the counter. I told “You” to make some green tea. The lord was not a fool, he had chosen well. Well, not wholly well, but well enough: he had had good value and I had made many hundreds per centum profit even if I had paid my Mama for the goods, which, of course, I had not. I made a wry face. He studied this wry face, then smiled.
“Have I turned you over a bit, eh? Turned you over? Picked too well, perhaps? Eh? Still, left you plenty, haven’t I, even if I’ve skimmed the cream a bit, what?”
I made a show of examining what he had selected, still wearing the wry face of a good loser.
“You have not quite ruined me,” I said at last. “You have left me a few pieces which may, for a couple of weeks, keep me out of the House of Correction. You have only made one mistake: this piece, this little sparrow-beaked jug with the crescent mark, is only English, although pretty. It is from the factory of Worcester and less than a hundred years old. Ask Uncle Henry, he will tell you.”
He thrust the little jug away with the back of a finger as though it were infested with small, biting insects.
“Give you that back, then. Can’t have Uncle Henry laughing at me. Call it your back-hander, what?”
“Hold it up to the light,” I went on; “you will see that the paste is of a pleasing, light sea-green, but there are always little ‘moons’ in it and the glaze
stretches away from the foot, it took them a long time to overcome these faults, just as it took your Chelsea factory years to discover that their rich lead glaze was killing their workmen faster than they could train them.”
“Vewwy likely,” he said, taking no pains to simulate interest. “D’you have a water-closet here or anything of that sort?”
“I am sorry, Lord Windermere, there is no such refinement, I’m a poor man, but the boy will fetch a chamber-pot.”
“Pray tell him to do so, for if I don’t piss, I swear I’ll burst like a frog.”
The boy “You” held the pot while his Lordship genteelly eased the pressure of his bladder, throwing, with the last musical cadence of piddle, a couple of pennies into the vessel.
“Not kindness,” he explained, securing his tight unmentionables, “never spoil another man’s servants, matter of hygiene, really. Makes certain that the child – good boy, that, for a bastard – empties the ‘Jerry’ directly, d’you see.”
“Yes,” I said.
When he had gone – he was not driving his phaeton today but was in an odd-looking Clarence, driven by an under-coachman with a gold-laced cocked hat and a splendid grog-blossom of a nose – I retired to bed, having written “1,250l and 2d” in the ledger. I mused about the happenings of the day and sipped experimentally at the tincture of opium which the boy had fetched. It was not unpleasant, it gave me an agreeable sensation of being not quite drunk. When “You” rapped upon my door, asking whether I wished supper or a whore, or both, I said that, for the time being, I needed nothing.
“There should be twopence in the till,” I added; “You may lay it out on jellied eels for yourself, and here is another penny for fried peas. See that you lock the door when you come in, there are thieves everywhere, thieves.”
While he was out I sipped some more of the tincture of opium. I heard little whatever-her-name-was from Tooley Street giving her distinctive tap-tapping upon the shop-door but I paid her no heed: my head was awhirl with the most delightful fantasies, many of them salacious but not of the sort which a smelly little guttersnipe girl, however inventive, could augment.
All the Tea in China Page 6