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.