All the Tea in China

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 trade, 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.”

“Yes?”

“Hindeed yes. And I means ‘insane’ to the letter. A capting in that line can be rich in three voyages, for he has a huge share and there is much to share, but my actuary friend at Lloyd’s puts his expectation of surwival at precisely two and seven-eighth voyages, haw haw! And even as I says it we are at the end of our own perilous woyage: Great Coram Street, home and beauty!”

To speak plainly, Mrs Jorrocks was not pleasing to look at, nor did she seem over-pleased to see us. She looked askance at my baggage until Mr J. whispered loudly to her that I was a great Dutch merchant-prince “travelling incog”, whereupon she creased her huge ham-like face into a smile and called me “Moungseer” each time she addressed me.

A shifty, snot-nosed boy was told off to carry my bags upstairs.

“And wash your hands first, Binjamin!” roared Jorrocks, “for I’m sure your thumb has been in my marmalade-pot as ever, you cupboard-headed little warmint!”

A pink, jolly maid called Batsay brought me hot water and a tin hip-bath. I did not look at her lasciviously for I thought it possible that she might furnish Mr J.’s own diversion in those times of the year when it is not permitted to chase foxes in England.

Scrubbed all over and wearing a change of linen, I went downstairs to find Mr Jorrocks pacing up and down, peering at a great gold watch in his hand. I read his mind for I, too, was ready for dinner.

“It will be but a snack, I fears,” he said apologetically, “for Mrs J. knew not when I was to return, nor that I would have the pleasure of your company and, indeed, she is but a few hours back from her mother’s in Tooting. But she has found a few prowisions in the cold larder — cheese, cold ham, cold beef, cold mutton — all the delicacies of the season as the sailor said, haw, haw! — and I daresay we shall make shift to tighten our weskit-buttons somewhat.”

Indeed, the repast was plentiful. First came a great tureen of gravy soup, a new thing for me but strong and appetising, into which Mr J. splashed quite the third of a bottle of brown sherry.

“Bristol Milk,” he chuckled. “I often lies avake vondering wot they feeds the cows on in Bristol!”

“Haw, haw,” I said politely.

Then we attacked the cold meats, of which there was great store: the round of beef was the size of a trap-drum and the other things were to the same scale. In between, we drank prime stout from the Marquess of Cornwallis hard by (he proved to be a tavern, not a nobleman, it was very puzzling) and toasted each other again and again with something called Crane’s Particklar (“hot and strong, real black-strap stuff, none of your French rot-gut,” Mr J. explained).

There was also a dish of hot buttered parsnips; they were very good. I ate them all, for Mr J. declared they spoiled his appetite for the meats. Then Batsay brought in a dish of things called “Poor Knights of Windsor”: these were pieces of bread and jam fried. They do not sound good but they are. Mr Jorrocks’s Stilton cheese was even better than Mr Creed’s; he pretended that it was “so werry frisky” that he had to hold it down on the table as I scooped, lest it walk away. This was a British joke, of course. We were by then, I think, a little drunk. He helped me to my bedroom, then I helped him to his, then he again to mine; this went on until Mrs J. appeared in a splendid déshabillé and coughed meaningfully.

In the morning — rather late in the morning — he and I breakfasted frugally off some cold mutton and bloaters and rich, dark marmalade from Oxford (where the English make capital sausages and also have a famous college called Belial) and then he lent me a curious little vehicle called a tub-trap, with the child Binjamin to drive, and a list of addresses of people who might have a shop-premise to let. By dinner-time I had made a bargain for a little shop with snug living-quarters above it, between a street called Strand and the cabbage-exchange of the Convent Gardens. We collected my Delft the next day and laid some of it out in an attractive fashion, using some good shop-fittings of the true San Domingo mahogany, racks and shelves and drawers, which I had seen lying in the back of Mr J.’s warehouse and which he let me have for one sovereign. This was not dear, for they were well-made, although dirty. The windows of the shop I washed myself, for in those days I had no stinking pride and Binjamin refused to do it for less than threepence. Then I put the shutters up and, on the way back to Great Coram Street, struck a bargain with a sign-writer to paint “C. VAN CLEEF & CO., WHOLESALE CHINA WAREHOUSE” in dirty white letters on the door-post, for I was learning how these things are done in England.

The next day Mrs J. condescended to come a-marketing with me: I bought a nice brass bedstead, a genuine hair mattress and a feather one to go on top of it, some bolsters and pillows and sheets and things of that kind, a little round-bellied stove, a kettle, a tea-pot and some drink. Yes, and some food. Then we went to a Foundling School and I bought a boy for a year to keep the place clean. I could have had a girl but I was wise, wise. The boy looked honest and stupid and, for his age, strong; when I showed him the place under the counter where he was to sleep, he was so happy he wept: he had never seen anything so comfortable. I could never quite make out his name so I called him “You”; he answered to it cheerfully. He was a good boy.

I took my leave, with much gratitude, of the good Jorrockses, kissing the hand of Mrs J., which made her even redder and to cry “Vell, I do declare!” I gave Batsay a shilling but nothing to Binjamin for I knew he had stolen quite so much as that from my breeches while pretending to brush them.

I did not open my shop the first day I entered it; I was sleepy; I slept all day and, to speak plainly, spent the evening whoring. You may depend upon it, there is no woman in the world to compare with a street-bred, fourteen-year-old London girl — and I speak as one who has sailed the Seven Seas and whored in most of their ports. Only the Japanese can compare. The one I selected was clean, well-finished at all points of her charming little body and, she told me, “new to the game”. She explained that she had taken up this profession because the food at home was meagre and she had an insatiable lust for little meat pies. The thought of them, it seemed, maddened her like wine. I bought her an abundance of these pies, hot; but only a little gin, for I had already long known that a girl full of food is flushed and beset with carnal thoughts, while a girl flushed with wine is often little more than a nuisance.

Certainly, when we got to bed she went about her work with unfeigned enthusiasm; I had never known such an indefatigable gymnast, she was gifted, gifted. Never have I laid out a few little meat pies so profitably.

At dawn, as the free-roaming roosters who live in the thick dung of the Strand commenced to crow hideously, I opened one eye and was sorry to see the child investigating the pockets of my breeches. I had taken the breeches off, you understand. I had of course hidden my money, too. She explained, quite unabashed, that she had been merely seeking the price of a little hot meat pie to stay her on the journey home to Tooley Street, where her father, who would beat her, was a tailor’s cutter, and that she would have taken no more. I think she was telling the truth although I was not a credulous man, even in those days.

I gave her the price of six twopenny pies and promised to give her the same — and her supper — whenever she was hungry. She visited me often after that, often. Sometimes she brought her little sister, who would sit in the corner, fascinated, and from time to time would make us a pot of Mr J.’s delicious tea, or run to the shop on the corner for a little, hot meat pie for her sister. Sometimes we let her come into the bed; she was charmingly inquisitive.

I wish I could remember their names but I am old now and can only recall the deeds. She — the older one — used to call me her “dear little Suffolk Punch” although I am not little and often told her that my home was in Holland, not Suffolk, which is a flat, rainy Province in the East of England.

After that first night with the girl whose name I cannot recall I was so tired that I lay in bed all day again, with the shutters of the shop still up. In the late afternoon the boy “You” came upstairs and rapped on my door, saying excitedly that “a right, prime, bang-up, slap-dash, out-and-out swell cove” was hammering on the shop-door with a “cane with a ’orse’s ’ead ’andle”. I considered this carefully, wondering how the child could have learned such language in a Charity School.

“Tell him,” I said at last, “that your master will be happy to wait upon him should he care to call again tomorrow.”

When I arose in the late evening, dressed to go out for supper and any other entertainment the night might afford, the boy “You” told me that the swell cove had cursed most dreadfully and said that he would by no means again venture into so vile a part of the town. I accepted this philosophically.

It was quite two afternoons before he — the swell cove — came back. The shop was now open and the shutters down. He was, indeed, a very swell cove: his hat shone like a looking-glass, his coachman-like surtout bore countless frogs, lappets and capes (the topmost of which was trimmed with the curly black fur from Afghanistan) and a glance out of the window told me that the phaeton he had arrived in was of the very finest, with a coat of arms on the panel of the door and a monogram embroidered on the hammer-cloth.

“Good afternoon, milord,” I said civilly, rubbing my hands in a tradesmanly way, as I supposed he would expect. “You are interested in old blue-and-white wares?”

He stared at me. I stared back, for I was not an Englishman and did not understand the niceties of class.

“I might be and then again I might not,” he said at last and, turning his back, began to examine such of the stock as I had chosen to lay out.

“How much,” he asked languidly, “is that?” pointing with the littlest finger of his gloved hand to a rather good small pot with an impeccable glaze.

“That?” I asked, raising an amused eyebrow. “That toy is a shilling. If you really want it you may pay me next time you are passing.”

He glowered at me. I picked up the piece and sneered at it, as though it were a mere pottery cow-creamer. “The piece to the right of it is thirty guineas, the piece to the left is fifty. This piece, since you are my first customer, and since it is of no value, you may have as a gift.”

His face darkened horridly.

“You are an insolent rascal,” he said quietly and dangerously.

I opened my fingers and let the little pot fall to the floor, where it was dashed to a thousand fragments. I snapped my fingers; the boy “You” crept out with a broom and swept the fragments away. The lord continued to glare at me. I looked back at him, not uncivilly. At last he turned on his heel and strode out of the shop. My shop, that is to say.

The boy, as I turned towards the stairs, gazed at me with saucer-eyes.

“Beg pardon, Sir,” he said, “but had you ought to have done that, Sir? ’Im being a lord, I mean?”

“Time will tell,” I said enigmatically, “and the end justifies the means.”

“Yes Sir, I’m sure Sir,” he said. I mounted the first two stairs, then a thought struck me. “Are you warm enough at night, ‘You’?” I asked.

“Oh, Sir, yes Sir, warm as toast.”

“Because there is a great deal of sacking and soft rags in the chest from which the Delft came.”

“Yes Sir, thankyou, Sir, beg pardon Sir, I have already used it for bedding, but it is as good as new, Sir, I swears.”

“Good boy. Now, all I ask is that, each week, when the weather is sunny, you shall spread it all out in the backyard to air it and to prevent smells. On the same day you shall go to the public fountain in the Convent Gardens vegetable-market and wash yourself all over with yellow soap. Here is twopence for the soap. You shall have the same each week unless I can smell you. The first smelliness and I shall beat you cruelly. You should make quite a halfpenny a weekout of the soap-money if you are careful. But mind: no smells!”

“Yes Sir, thankyou Sir, I swear you shall not have the least annoyance.” He was a well-spoken child for a charity-bastard although thin, thin.

I trudged up to my brass bedstead feeling all the noble emotions of an English gentleman, while he, no doubt, scuttled in to his cosy rat’s-nest under the counter. A moment later I was at the head of the stairs.

“You!” I roared. He was there in a twinkling.

“Why have I fresh long candles in my chamber-sticks? What has been done with last night’s snuff-ends?” The child quaked, with terror but not, I think, with guilt.

“Sir,” he said, “there was but a quarter-inch of tallow left in each stick, so I recharged them. I scraped out the ends and have melted the into the lid of a tin box, thinking to use them with a rag wick so as to read my Pilgrim’s Progress each night, as the Charity-school master bade me. I truly thought, Sir, that they were my perquisites: I am no thief, I swear.”

“Hrrumph,” I said, as I had heard Englishmen say. “Well, be that as it may, put some clothes on and run to the shop on the corner and fetch me three little fourpenny mutton pies, hot, for my supper. Aye, and a pennyworth of fried peas. Here is a shilling and a penny. And look sharp!”

When he returned I had changed into my better clothes and told him that I had, after all, decided to sup out.

“Do what you will with the pies,” I said in a gruff, English voice, “I do not care. And, listen, ‘You’, each week you may have one penny-dip candle for reading by. This is no kindness, it is because I cannot afford to support little blind bastards.”

I spent the next few days chiefly in bed, plucking up my strength for the battle before me, whoring a little but also thinking a great deal about how a dealer in Delft should go about becoming rich. Once or twice I sent for a hansom cab and prowled about that area between St James’s Palace and Regent Street where, in those day, the serious dealers in old pottery and porcelain held their state. I was shocked — and, of course, pleased — to find how ignorant most of them were. One or two — and they had Jewish names — knew something: not as much as me, but something. The others filled their windows with flashy rubbish. What I did learn from all of them, however, was the prices that could be asked; they amazed me. I, in turn, was amazed that my mama, who had never left her native Province, should have given me such good advice in respect of “walking around and about”.

I did not go into the shops of the dealers with Jewish names and no ignorance; I went into the shops where the goods in the window were laughably over-priced, for I reasoned (and this is still good reasoning) that a man who over-prices foolishly will make mistakes in the other direction, too. I spent a few pounds carefully in such shops. Later in my life I made a great many lamentable mistakes but in those early days I made only one, for I seemed to bear a charmed life. This was it, and I tell it without shame for it was beautifully done. So was I.

Walking into a nasty little mud-pie of a shop, far from Bond Street, I noticed on the floor an incomparable saucer, polychromed, yet from the very earliest part of the Ming Dynasty, when such wares were made with great difficulty and then only for the Emperor himself and his concubines. I kicked the saucer gently as I passed it. It rang true. It was a jewel, a jewel, unflawed. Better, it was dirty and crusted with tide-marks of old milk and a great, horrid, ginger pussy-cat was schlipp-schlopping some sour milk from it.

I walked around the shop, pretending to look at his pitiful stock, then said: “There is nothing here quite in my line, but I have taken a fancy to your pussy-cat, for my little daughter has begged me again and again to buy her just such a pussy-cat.”

“Aarrgh,” said the shop-keeper, “aarrgh. My own liddle daughter loves that there pussy-cat better than life itself. I vouldn’t sell that pussy-cat for a fi’-pound note, I swear I vouldn’t, for I could never look my little girl in the face agin.”

“You are trying to say that this pussy-cat costs six pounds?” I asked.

“Yes, Sir.”

I dealt out six good English pounds, scooped the noxious beast into my arms and, as though it were an after-thought, bent over to pick up the saucer.

“The pussy-cat will be accustomed to its own milk-bowl,” I said off-handedly. “It is dirty but I shall take it with me.”

“Oh no, no, no, Sir,” he cried. “No, not by no means. Vy, that saucer there ’as sold me three pussy-cats in as many months!”

I looked at him without expression.

“Would you care,” I asked “to buy this pussy-cat back for one pound? I have just noticed that it is not precisely the colour of pussy-cat my daughter pines for.”

“No, Sir, thankyou, Sir,” he said, “for to tell you the truth, the moment you discards that cat, were it in John O’Groats or even Hampstead itself, it will be back here by nightfall, shit or bust, for I gives it a little catnip and hopium in its milk each night; it has grown accustomed to it, you see.”

Anyone who has ever fenced knows the feeling of scraping his foil tentatively along the blade of a professor of arms. There is an authority about the resistance, an especial timbre to the ring of the steel which tells the almost-good swordsman that he is paired against a master of the art.

“Good day,” I said.

“Good day, Sir. Pray call again.”

Every day the boy “You” took down the shutters at noon, having made the floor, the mahogany shop-fittings and the Delft glow, for he was, it proved, a cleanly and diligent boy. He was handy, too, for he neatly pierced for me a little Judas window in the private door, so that I could observe customers unseen. Only four came into the shop in as many days: two were dealers on the prowl, I could tell this by their casual, flickering glances. The boy told them that all the stock was spoken for, as I had instructed. One was a poor old woman with some blue-and-white to sell; it was all rubbish except for a little, sparrow-beaked jug from the English factory of Worcester, for which I gave her a few pennies.

The fourth was the person I had been praying for: the angry milord. He stamped about the shop, glaring at things and pretending, in a childish way, not to be aware of my presence. At last he picked up a small and beautiful vase and walked out of the shop with it. I made no move. He stood outside the shop holding the vase up to the sun, looking through it to see the colour of the paste. I went upstairs to make a pot of Mr Jorrocks’s tea. When I came down the lord was back in the shop, walking moodily up and down, whacking his boot-leg with his cane. He rounded on me.

“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 clevered 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.

I sipped away at the bottle, each sip sending me to a higher realm of ecstasy. The night was beautiful with colour, strange beasts, deliciously vile and lovely women and music beyond compare. I took the last drops with the bottle clamped between my lips, imagining that it was one of the multiplex teats of Diana of Ephesus.

One thousand years later a savage blow across the face brought me back to this base and venal world. I opened a languorous eye. The afternoon sun was entering the window: clearly, it was tomorrow. Above me towered a huge, angry man with whiskers. Behind him whimpered and cowered the boy “You”. “Fetched a doctor, Sir,” he squeaked, “I fought you was a stiff un, I swear I did. I hope I did right.”

I mumbled something in Dutch which I forget now and, in any case, could not commit to paper; then I sank back into delicious sleep.

Another savage blow lashed my face; I scarcely winced, reasoning that to ignore it would make it stop. It did not stop. The doctor had a wet towel in his hand and, when I finally opened an eye, seemed ready to use it again. And again.

“If he dares to strike me again,” I thought, happily, “I shall rise up like an avenging angel and tear his throat out with my long, red, jewel-encrusted finger-nails, then feed him to my leash of dragon-dogs, to the tinkling laughter of my hundred odalisques.”

He hit me again with the wet towel. His fate was sealed. Alas, though, I found that I could not get up: each time I attempted to do so the stately pleasure-domes of my inflamed mind gave place to an intense desire to vomit. I decided to give him best, he was but a mere mortal. I went back to sleep. He hit me again. There are few ecstasies which can withstand repeated blows with a wet towel. I commenced to weep. He yanked me to my feet and shouted to “You” to bring some hot, strong coffee.

“Couldn’t drink it,” I mumbled.

“You are not going to drink it,” he said with some satisfaction, walking me up and down the bedroom and flicking my behind and, once, my privates, with the cold, wet towel. When I grew tired he put a bottle of smelling-salts under my nose, which made my head explode into coloured lights like the fireworks at a Holland Kermesse. Hooking my arm about his neck, so that I could not lie down, he opened his bag and drew out a hideous object, all nozzles and tubes and a gutta-percha bulb. Then “You” brought the hot coffee and the doctor threw me on the bed, face down. I went gratefully to sleep but, within a moment, something dreadful happened to me from behind; an invasion and a scalding influx.

You do not wish to learn more, nor I to recount it.

Later, I do not know how much later, he was pulling open my eyelids, studying my pupils, waking me up. This was too much.

“Go away, or I shall kill you,” I said.

“Six and eightpence,” he said. I was by now awake enough to offer him six shillings for prompt cash; he took it, but the expression on his face did not make me feel brave and clever.

“How long have you been swilling this filth?” he asked, as he packed his bag.

“This is my first time,” I answered.

“Then you’re a damned imbecile. Ten grains of opium in that bottle, the dose for a confirmed addict. Lucky to be alive. If that’s the way you want to die, don’t call me in again; if you think I enjoy clystering out your back passage you’re mistaken, I promise you. Even for six shillings, ready cash. Next time, get your brat to call in the Chinee quack in Villiers Street, probably do it for half a crown.”

He left without saying “good-day” and I sank back under the blankets and wept bitterly. I was stricken with home-sickness for that beautiful, hot, swinish land where the opium had transported me; it was better to be dead there, there amongst the colours, the vile ladies and the strange music, than to be alive above a shop near the street called Strand in London, hundreds of miles from my Mama. It seemed sensible to me to obtain some more opium, nothing else would do. I banged upon the floor, perhaps feebly.

In a little while the boy “You” entered, carrying a bowl which steamed, smelling of rich meat.

“Out,” I screamed, “OUT!”

“Yes, Sir, but, please Sir, the doctor give me thruppence to buy gravy-meat for to make you this beef-tea; pray drink it, Sir, do; he made me swear to get it down you. It’s for your health, you see Sir.”

I gagged it down with but ill grace. To be candid, I wished to beat someone painfully but I had not the strength to beat even “You”.

“What is in that other basin?” I asked sternly.

“Nothing Sir, not yet, Sir. The doctor said that your stomach was weak and that you might not keep the beef-tea down first time.”

“My stomach is strong,” I replied, “and the doctor is an impudent fellow. If there is any unused coffee left, you may bring me some; it was but a momentary weakness.” He brought me some coffee, which I drank, in the ordinary way that one takes coffee. The desire for the absurdly beautiful lands of opium-eating was dwindling: I knew that I must never travel those wondrous jungle-paths again unless I was prepared to eschew all the more solid pleasures of this fat and splendid real world, where a clever man may become rich and famous, if he keeps his head clear. I cleared my head peremptorily.

“Bring me my breeches!” I cried. He brought them. I felt in the pockets.

“Do you see these two sixpences? Now, hold, one of them is for you, to spend upon nourishing food. The other you are to hide, ‘You’, and the next time I bid you go out and buy me opium, either tincture or in the lump, you are to take that sixpence into the street and hire a hulking carter, drayman or vegetable porter from the market and bid him come in here and beat me about the head until I fall unconscious. This will be both cheaper and better for my health. Is that clear?”

He did not like this, he shifted from foot to foot, but in the end his intelligence grasped him, for he was not really a stupid boy.

“Yes, Sir,” he said.

I told him that I was going to sleep and that I wished to be called early.

“Finish the beef-tea,” I added, “for it will make you big and strong.”

I did not sleep at once, however; I lay awake considering what had happened to me and wondering at the power of this opium, which could almost kill me yet make me lust for more of it, even as I quaked and retched. Clearly it was a more powerful commodity than Demon Rum and one that could be dealt with profitably if the vendor abstained from it himself.

My thoughts turned to Lord Windermere and the twelve hundred and fifty pounds — some sixteen thousand gulden. His selection of my stock had been strongly in favour of Ming and Kang H’si wares and their finest imitators: I did not know where I could get more, of that quality, short of going to China myself and I could not envisage a future of picking a living as a dealer in the commoner pottery. My thoughts went round in a circle. The opium dreams had been delicious. I fell asleep.

I spent the whole of the next morning virtuously; I rearranged what was left of my stock to its best advantage and stuck little numbered pieces of paper onto everything and wrote descriptions and prices in a “Long Tom” ledger so that “You” would be able to sell when I was out. Then I drank some glasses of sherry white and walked to the “Piazza” where I found my good Mr Jorrocks and his friend Sir Tees, in the Corner box arguing about the relative merits of skylarks and wheatears. Mr Jorrocks, it seemed, thought nothing of driving all the way to Brighton to eat wheatears at the Star and Garter when they were in season (the shepherds on the South Downs catch these little birds in horsehair snares) but Sir Tees scoffed at this, saying that they were no better than pudding-sparrows. I quietened this argument (for we do not eat such things in Holland) by inviting them both to see whether they could eat as many mutton chops as I could.

“A trifle early for me,” said the Yorkshireman, pulling out a silver half-hunter.

“Werry early,” agreed Mr J, pulling out a gold half-hunter.

“But …?” I said, fumbling in my waistcoat but not pulling out my gun-metal “turnip” watch.

The mutton chops were very good, although the boiled potatoes and cabbage were not: the British do strange and disgusting things to their vegetables. We all fortified ourselves heroically. Our little dinner was only marred when a barrel-organ outside struck up the popular air “If I Had a Donkey Vot Vouldn’t Go”. Mr Jorrocks rose to his feet, tore off his wig and dashed it to the floor.

“By all that’s impure!” he bellowed, “shall I never be free of the warmint? I swears he follows me all over London! Waiter, waiter I say, take this penny and implore that pernicious dinner-spoiler to move into the next street before I does him a mischief.”

“You are not, then, fond of music, Mr J.?” I asked carefully, when the music had stopped.

“Knows only two tunes,” he grunted. “One of them is ‘God Save The King’ and the other — hisn’t.”

We called for more chops, again and again; my Mama would have been proud of me. Then we went into the reading-room to snooze a little. (I should explain that in England you sleep in the reading-room, just as you eat in the coffee-room, smoke in the study, spend the afternoon in the morning-room, drink tea in the drawing-room and, unless you happen to be in love with your wife, sleep in the dressing-room whilst your wife, quite likely, is committing adultery in her sewing-room. It is all very strange. There is now a book called Alice in Wonderland which explains how the English system works, although in veiled language.)

This snoozing of mine was not long, for my friends snored like Dutchmen. I crept out without awakening them, paid the bill and took a cab to the dealers’ part of London which in those days was a few mean streets to the South of Piccadilly Road, near the Palace of St James’s. I sauntered about, for I was in my fine new coat, a coat in which one could saunter with confidence, looking carefully at things in windows and even more carefully at their prices. Whilst I was looking carefully into such a window, of a shop kept by someone of a Jewish name and no ignorance, the proprietor opened the door of the back room and came into the shop. While that door was briefly open I had a brief vision, in the back room, of what seemed to be an incomparable set of five “Lange Lyzen” vases, quite beautiful. Although the dealer was, from his goods and their prices, not a man of ignorance, I felt drawn into his shop as though by invisible cords. We looked at each other, then nodded perfunctorily as people of our religion do when we meet each other but not in the bosom of our families.

I browsed around the shop, looking at this and that, while he pottered in and out, he knew I would not steal anything. I chaffered for, and bought, a fine eggshell cup and saucer of the real Imperial Yellow; also a good rice-bowl with the “leaping boy” decoration. They were not too dear, for it was a slack season; also, he was overstocked (which is the besetting vice of us Jews) and, at that time of the afternoon, neither of us was in the mood for protracted bargaining: we both knew what I would pay and we did not care to go through the usual long agony — or ecstasy — of reaching that figure.

As I was leaving I said “Ah, by the way …”

He did not say “Oy veh!” and he only sketched out the gesture of slapping the palms of his hands to the forehead. What he said was: “So. A ‘by-the-way’ asker, already. You have perhaps an expensive mistake you wish to pass on to a fellow-dealer? Or you have heard of my beautiful daughter with the large dowry?”

“Neither of those,” I said politely; “I just wished to say that I might be interested to buy a set of good Lange Lyzen if the price were right.” He shuffled his feet, avoiding my gaze. “Only the ones in the window,” he said at last.

“They are pretty,” I said politely, “but they are not quite as good as I require; moreover, they are but three and I wish for a full set of five, such as those I chanced to notice in your back room when you opened the door.”

“Not for sale,” he said gruffly.

“A pity. But perhaps, all the same, I might be permitted to look?” He hesitated, then agreed. “But you will promise to keep your mouth shut, eh?”

I promised, thinking that perhaps the person he had bought them from might not have been quite entitled to sell them. He read my thoughts.

“They are honestly come by,” he growled. “If you are as clever as you think you may be able to guess why I cannot sell them.”

The more I looked at the beautiful vases — the finest I had ever seen — the more puzzled I became. They bore a fine set of six-character marks and there was no visible flaw. When I made as though to pick up the last one the old dealer lifted an admonitory finger.

“Look only,” he said; “don’t lift.” I thought about that, then lifted up one of the others, looked at the bottom again, felt it. The glaze there was very odd to the touch. I took it to the light: there was no doubt, it was not glaze but a clear varnish over white paint on which the marks had been forged. But why? It was baffling, for the pots themselves were as genuine as golden sovereigns.

“Forged marks on genuine vases,” I said to the shopkeeper. “What was the need? And why does this prevent you from selling them? You have but to scrape off the paint.”

He laughed bitterly.

“I scraped; oy, I scraped. See.” He handed me the fifth pot. He had indeed scraped to good purpose: half-revealed on the bottom was a beautiful, delicate, detailed painting under the glaze. It depicted five most gifted Chinese persons engaged in a complicated act of quite unbelievable indecency; I found it entrancing: my face and neck became hot. He took the vase out of my hands.

“Don’t enjoy!” he said sternly. “Two hundred pounds I gave for these paskudnyaks — you are a mavin, you know that was a metsieh but not robbery — and now I dare not show them at all. Even if the police did not send me to prison, who would buy? Collectors of porcelain are respectable people, ladies and gentlemen; noblemen some of them.”

“Yes,” I said reflectively. “How much of a loss would you take? I think I know a meshuggener who might take them.”

“Loss?” he asked suspiciously, “loss? Who’s talking of loss? Maybe only a small trifle of a profit …”

We settled down to haggle in earnest. He was an old man much frightened of the authorities, for in those unenlightened days our race was much persecuted; every time I slipped the word “prison” into my talk he covered his eyes and said either “Zeeser Gottenyu!” or “Gevald!”

It was half an hour before I saw that his price was hardening at one hundred and ten guineas. I trimmed the shillings off and paid one hundred and ten pounds, leaving him keening at the loss but, clearly, relieved to be rid of the dangerous vases.

I told my cabbie to take me home via Eaton Square, where I left a note for Lord Windermere, urging him to call on me as soon as might be, lest he miss an incomparable purchase.

At the shop, the boy “You” told me that he had sold his first pot, for five-and-seventy shillings. He was very proud. Also, his new suit of “duds” had arrived and he asked me shyly whether he might put them on and go to the Foundling Hospital to visit his little mates there, for it was the first Friday of the month, when such visits are permitted to the little “come-by-chance” inmates. I agreed.

“But first,” I told him, “you are to climb onto the roof and break off a little piece of lead, about so big, for I wish to scrape a bottom.” He sped off on this mission without question, for he had long ago decided that I was insane.

“You” was out, scrubbed and shining, and I had almost finished scraping the varnish and paint off the bottom of the second pot when Lord Windermere arrived in his Clarence. The Clarence was, I thought, a sign that he was in a buying mood, for it is a roomy rather than a dashing vehicle.

“Well now, what’s all this, what’s all this, burst me? Can’t a man enjoy his whore and his bottle of port without being summoned like a footman by every Jew hawker in London?”

He was not being rude; in those days when an Englishman wished to make it clear that you were accepted he called you terrible names, it meant that he thought you were British enough to take British jokes. They were quite mad. Now they are still mad but more polite; I think I liked them better when they were mad and rude. I truly believe that Lord Windermere thought Holland a possession of Great Britain; they teach them Horace and Virgil at school, scarcely any of them knows that the Dutch Navy once smashed its way up the Thames Valley to London and then sailed out again unscathed. The only Britishers with a sense of history are the Irish, but with them it is a disease.

I laid out the “Lange Lyzen” on the gleaming mahogany counter. He looked at them hungrily.

“These,” I said, “are one thousand and one hundred and ten pounds. To you, that is, of course.”

He gaped.

“Are you out of your senses?” he said at last. “Curse me, you said you’d rob me one day but you’re coming on too fast, too fast; they’d be dear at seven hundred and you know it.”

I showed him one of the bottoms. He gaped again, then roared with delight and laughter. “Done!” he bellowed, “done! Rot me, you knew I’d have to have ’em, you sod.”

He gave me a draft on Mr Coutts’s excellent bank and I showed him how to scrape with the piece of lead. We spent a happy evening, drinking three bottles of Madeira between us and scraping, scraping; hooting with pleasure as each lubricious scene became manifest.

“Smash me!” he cried at one point, “oh I say smash my eyes, d’you see this feller’s rump-splitter? Demme, it’s a good thing I’m a bachelor, couldn’t keep all these nudgers and fannies if there was a Lady Windermere about the house, could I?”

When all five of the vases’ bottoms were clean — if that is an appropriate word — and blazing in all their wonderful filthiness, Lord Windermere clapped me on the shoulder in the friendliest fashion, said that he’d never done a better day’s work in his life and vowed to send me a dozen of his prime Sercial as a “sweetener”, first thing in the morning.

After he had left I called for paper and pens and wrote to my mother like a good son. “This London is a fine place,” I wrote, “and I think I shall do good business here. Please send more pots so that I may make all our fortunes. Tell my father that I read the Josephus whenever I am not too tired with my incessant labour.”

Then I went to bed, replete with virtuous feelings and contentment.

I lay awake for quite an hour, for my head was buzzing with half-formed plans, plans only indirectly concerned with pottery and porcelain.

I did not have a reply from my Mama until eight days later for the posts in those days were bad and slow: sometimes a letter posted in the afternoon just to another part of London would not be delivered until the next morning; it was disgraceful.

Her letter was loving but crisp. She hoped I was well and that I was not conversing with bad girls from whom I might catch a disease. She was ready to send me more Delft and Chinese wares so soon as I remitted the money for the first lot. My father, she said, sent his love. She, for her part, sent me hers and hoped that I was eating properly, eschewing the notorious English puddings and pies.

I considered this letter carefully for many an hour. Honesty and filial affection ruled my actions in the end: I went to Coutts’s excellent bank and arranged for two hundred and three pounds and fifteen shillings to be sent to my mother: she would, I knew be delighted. It shewed her a handsome profit on the wares for I knew her buying habits well.

Then I went to find my good Mr Jorrocks.

“Vy!” he cried “’Ow delighted I am to see you! Binjamin! I say Binjamin you young warmint! Fetch a pair of bottles of the strong stout from under the sideboard and two clean rummers, mind, clean not viped with the tail of your shirt, for I knows your ’abits! Now, my dear young friend, ’ow can I serve you? Delighted to do anything in my power. The Surrey Subscription ’Unt meets at Croydon tomorrow, perhaps you’d care for a day with the ’ounds? Would do you a power of good, for you looks a little peaked — not quite the plump currant — ’opes it’s only dewotion to business,” he added, looking at me keenly, “and not wicious living? ‘Mens sane in Corporal saner’ as my illustrious friend Nimrod says.”

I reassured him; vowed that I was in bed by ten each night (which was, in fact, true, so lustful I was in those days) and swallowed the strong, nourishing stout with many an appreciative smack of the lips, for this was his way of drinking and it seemed civil to emulate him.

“Compliments you on your tog, Mr Dutch,” he said, wiping the froth from his upper lip, “looks quite the thing, werry gentlemanlike.” (My coat, you may recall, was modelled upon his.) “But I feels the kickseys — for trowsers I shall not call them — is somewhat below your station in life — have a kind of groomish look. Pantaloons is the harticle; pantaloons and boots. Marks you out as a sportsman of quality.”

“Yes,” I said humbly.

“Now, ’ow can I serve you?”

“Mr J., I have been thinking about your edifying remarks on the opium trade and your statement that, had you been free to do so, you would have had a venture in it yourself.”

“True, true. But it’s werry risky.”

“I understand that, but, if you will forgive me, I am still a young man and the riskishness appeals to me; moreover, it seems to me that on such a voyage I would have the opportunity of buying superior Chinese porcelains of a kind for which there seems to be a brisk demand in London Town and which I cannot obtain in sufficient quantity either here or, indeed, in Holland.”

“My dear young Sir, the hopium-carrying trade is almost hentirely in the hands of a most reputable firm vich we calls Jardine Matheson (although Dent & Co. is bursting into the market), because the Hon. East India Co itself does not vish to sully its hands with so noxious a trade except for growing the poppies and taking the profits. Also, I understands that warious American colonial upstarts is carving themselves a knotch of the loaf and coming back with it buttered. But there is also wot they calls the country-trade, vich does not much frequent the treaty-ports, choosing rather to range up and down the Hokken Coast, running the goods in where they can and obtaining higher prices, despite the depperedations of pirates and wenal mandarins, then running back to the River to lay out the bar-silver on the new teas and bolts of silk.”

I thought about this as best I could, because I was not, in those days, clever, only avaricious.

“Mr Jorrocks,” I said at last, “could you introduce me to a person engaged in the country-trade part of this commerce, in order that I might buy a share in such a venture?”

He shifted his bottom uneasily in the capacious chair.

“I am not asking you to guarantee my credit,” I said, perhaps a little stiffly. He raised both hands protestingly.

“Nothink was further from my mind, Mr Dutch, pray do not for a hinstant think that my mind was dwelling on anything of the kind. Wot consarned me was the thought of a innocent young cock like you inwesting your tin in so werry perilous a wenture.”

“Well, Mr J.,” I said mildly, “I shall be there myself to look after my tin, do you see.”

He gaped at me in a droll way, then inserted a finger under his wig and scratched his pate.

“The risks,” he said at last, “are hatrocious; ’opes I’ve made that clear?”

“Oh, yes,” I said in an off-hand way, for I was young then and brave, brave.

“Werry well, since I sees you’re intent on fetching up at the ‘cold cook-shop’, I’ll do my best for you.”

He fished out a great pen-knife, went to his scrutoire, as he called it, mended one pen after another, settled on one which would drop ink to his satisfaction and scratched and spluttered away with it until he had drafted some letters of introduction for me. I thanked him cordially but he wagged his great pink head with some sadness.

“Vishes you safe,” he said. “Leave your gear in my ware-’ouse — it’ll be there when you return.” It showed a rare and grateful sensitivity on his part to say “when” rather than “if”.

“Thankyou, Mr J.”

It was to be a long time indeed before I again saw my good friend, who had fostered in me a great love for England and all things English.