“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.