When I had finished I pushed the little Kees out from under the tarpaulin and rested my head upon the bag of clothes. I did not hear Old Gerrit come aboard.
CHAPTER TWO
There was a gentle but vexing schlipp-schlopping noise which annoyed me into wakefulness. “Piss off!” I said in Dutch but in a friendly way to little Kees, already intent as I was to become a dog-loving Englishman, my new life.
The noise did not piss off, nor the little Schipperke was not there licking my nose or stealing my mother’s good smoked eel. The schlipp-schlopp came from outside the fusty cell of crates and tarpaulin in which I had spent the night; indeed, it came from outside the very boat itself. We were, that is to say Old Gerrit, Kees and I were under way; we were moving down the canal under sail and as I became awake I found that I needed to be sick. Quickly. I fought my way out of the fore-peak, found a side and achieved the sickness. It was the wrong side that I had found. The side from which the wind was blowing. This was unpleasant. I made my way aft, stumbling over things. Old Gerrit — who else? — was at the tiller with a nasty old pipe upside down in his toothless mouth. (His barge was one which still had the steer-board but he preferred to use the tiller for he was lazy, lazy.) He flicked an eye at me. His only eye.
“There is the bucket, there,” he said, pointing with his chin. I streamed the bucket over the side, cleansed myself as best I could and sat down upon the taffarel. “Taffrail” I later learned to call it: it means the rail enclosing the aftermost part of a vessel.
I had known Old Gerrit since I was a little child — say, ten years — and had always liked him: he looked like all the pictures in all the story-books. His chin almost touched his nose; he had no teeth at all in front but some, I think, at the back, for there he clenched his pipe and often, when we children teased him, munched and crunched off the end in fury and spat out a spray of clay pieces. His pipes were always very short. One of his eyes was covered with a shiny pink patch, tied on with a piece of ribbon; he once let us look underneath and wonder at the tiny wrinkled hole. The other eye was not nearly so nice: the eyeball was a rich chestnut-brown and the iris wobbled about in it like a raw egg in a bucket of blood.
“Your mother was here this morning,” he snarled. “We talked. Talked as best we could over you snoring like a sow pigging. Here.” And he kicked towards me a paper packet, a heavy one. I picked it up, looked it over carefully. It was sealed with my father’s ring and the wafers had not been disturbed.
“Why do you look so carefully?” he said. “Am I a thief to steal stivers from babies?”
“Are you?” I answered.
“Go and do something nameless to your sister.”
“I do not have a sister, Old Gerrit.”
“You are sure of that? Your father has sworn to that?”
I undid the packet. It contained one thousand gulden. I stowed them about my person, while Old Gerrit spat noisily over the side. A woman on the canal-bank berated him, calling him a disgusting old man, for the colourful spittle had landed upon her bleaching-lawn. Old Gerrit shrieked back that he had been a disgusting young man and that he saw no reason to change at the behest of fat, adulterous laundresses. Her reply, interestingly narrating his intimacies with his dog, was mercifully borne away by the wind as our boat drew a little wind and passed out of earshot. Dutch ladies are very clean and, except for laundresses, modest of speech.
“What else did my mother leave, Old Gerrit?” I asked.
“A chest of old pots for you. A few stivers for me: not nearly enough for conveying a nasty young fornicator to Rotterdam but I am no man for arguing with women.”
“No,” I said.
“Especially women like your mother.”
“Yes,” I said. “But what else did she leave?”
His eye wobbled at me menacingly for a moment and then, snarling and farting, he reached under a pile of nameless rubbish in the cockpit and fished out a big stoneware bottle of the true Z. O. Genever: this is a kind of gin but not at all like what is sold for gin in England.
“It was for me,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, gently taking it from his hand. I drank thirstily, thrust the bottle back into his hand, ran to the side and made another offering to the Lord of the Canal.
“Waste,” he said.
I drank some more; this time I kept it down and felt better.
“What is there to eat, Old Gerrit?”
What he said is not usually considered edible.
“No, seriously Old Gerrit, I am hungry — aren’t you?”
“There is a jack-pike and a perch, only a couple of days old; cook them, never mind the smell. Also some onions, you will find them.”
I found the fish — they took little finding, they almost found themselves — and the onions. Spitefully, I did not throw them over the side, I cooked them up for Old Gerrit, who grudgingly praised my deftness with the skillet. I myself ate smoked eel on good rye bread from my mother’s bag of food; capped it with another mouthful of the good Hollands and lit one of the Sumatra cheroots. Suddenly it was a good morning to be alive in; the sun sparkled on the little waves of the canal, crowning each one with a golden star, the sky was as blue as the finest Ming hawthorn-pattern jar; I had a thousand gulden in my pockets, my boots rested on a case of good Delft and before me lay adventure: London and London girls — city girls, not fat cousins and the pregnant, pudding-faced daughters of country Ridders.
Life was good. It is still pretty good but not good in the way that it was at that moment.
I was so happy that I gave Old Gerrit a cheroot: not one of the Sumatras of course but an old one from my pocket, good but a little cracked. He eyed it with disgust, crumbled it up and stuffed it into his nasty old pipe. He was famous for his ill manners.
After Hertogenbosch (“Bois-le-Duc” they still called it in those days) we had a fair fresh breeze for the Willemstad Hollandsch Diep — the nose of the barge positively “cut a feather” — and by evening we were tied up at Willemsdorp. Old Gerrit said that we would do the last leg, to Rotterdam, on the following day; he was tired and thirsty, thirsty, for I had been doling out the gin in small portions for his own good and because I, too, liked it.
I helped him with the brails — pieces of string which secured the big sail — then raced him to the inn and ordered something hot, which proved to be disgusting: sour cabbage and the belly-fat of a pig. I stayed my hunger with the speciality of the house which everyone else seemed to be drinking: rum stolen from the British Navy, served hot and spiced and with a little baked apple in every jug.
I fell in with good company at that inn; one young fellow of about my own age took my uneaten dinner and scoffed it greedily while his brother told jokes of a dirtiness then unknown to me. The jokes were very funny. When I told these brothers that I was bound for England they said that they and their father were sailing there too, on the next morning’s tide, very early. They were for Harwich but they reckoned that for a consideration they could take me to the Pool of London first. We haggled all evening, I pretending to be near destitute, and finally settled on six gulden (nearly half an English sovereign) for the passage, ten stivers (almost a shilling) for each hot meal and two stivers for every refreshment in between. I was right to trust them: thieves would not have asked such high prices — indeed, they would probably have offered to take me free, and robbed and perhaps murdered me.