Kyril Bonfiglioli - All the Tea in China

I began to believe that our chat was at an end so I returned his goodnight and, consumed now with curiosity, I did indeed procure a tin cup of rum and strolled forrard.

The man O’Casey was an Irish and so had a great gift for speech, although some of this was not always easy to comprehend. I listened politely for a while as he extolled the beauties and virtue of a place called Tralee, then delicately raised the subject of Captain Cattermole.

“Captain Cattermole?” he said, “Captain Cattermole? A fine raparee of a man: had he but been born in Kerry he would have been perfection itself.” Two fat tears rolled down his weathered cheeks. “A brave bull of a man,” he went on; “when he was in port you could see the women dancing round him like coopers round a cask. When the wind broke from his splendid, God-given arse it would part the thickest of thickets and topple the tallest forest tree. Did he but belch in a genteel fashion the foundations of the poor-house would mutter and crumble and all the old and needy would bless themselves, thanking God for such rich enjoyment. Did he but pick his teeth, why, every cur and cat for miles around would scramble to the feast, leaving their dinners. As to his coupling, when he could bring his lovely mind to it, he was like one of them great steam locomotives working off a grudge against the buffers. I had that from one of his very wives herself.”

“A bigamist, then?” I asked idly.

“God save ye, no, a good Cartholic, never more than one wife at the same time at all. It’s just that he was hard on wives, wasn’t I telling you? It might be four he wore out or it might be five and never a child could he get out of any one of them. There’s little scraggy fellers that have their cabins so full of gossoons that they’d splash out between your toes but Jack Cattermole could never get one out of a woman, bump away as he might.”

“Indeed,” I said in a suitable voice.

“‘Indeed’ is the very two words in it,” he replied.

The Irish have a wonderful command of language, wonderful. If ever they learn to read and write there will, one day, be great literature from them, mark my words.

I bade O’Casey goodnight and repaired to my cabin, there to chew reflection’s solitary cud until supper-time.

We rounded Cape Comorin as neatly as any seaman could wish and were soon making long slants up the Coromandel Coast under all plain sail and sometimes with royals set, accordingly as the wind veered from the east through south to the west. It was an easy, leisurely time, even for the common sailor-folk, but it was plain even to me that they no longer went about their business with their usual “cheerily-oh”.

One night, when we had left Madras’s lights on our port quarter and had no landfall to look for until Vizagapatam, Peter fished out from under his bunk a black, fat-bellied bottle of something called “Van Der Hum’s” which he had prudently laid in at the Cape. It was too sweet for my taste but rich, rich ; also as strong as the thighs of a Griqua girl — Peter warned me to turn my head away from my glass when lighting a cheroot, lest my breath should ignite. I was, even in those my salad days, abstemious in all things, but on that night I felt his need to be joined by a friend in becoming a little drunk, and could not deny him so small an act of amity.

“The men,” I said in an off-hand fashion, when Peter had drunk quite one third of the potent bottle, “the men seem to have lost some little of their, ah, zest. Is it not so?”

He looked at me owlishly.

“Seamanship, Karli, is a sort of Freemasonry — are you at all familiar with the word?”

“I have heard it,” I answered guardedly, for I had long ago “tried” him in a veiled way and knew that he was not of our Craft.

“Well, d’you see, Karli, although those Yankees aboard the Martha Washington were, in a way, our deadly rivals, nevertheless many of our people had sailed with many of theirs and there is scarcely a man aboard who has not caroused or brawled with a Martha Washington man in one or another port of the Seven Seas.”

He paused a long while, drinking some more of the villainous Van Der Hum. I did not, for once, say anything, although I wished to tell him about my talk with the Irishman O’Casey.

“So you see, Karli, they feel that our Captain’s little ruse, which lured them onto a coral reef and sent them flaming down to hell, does not seem to them a legitimate ruse de guerre , for there is, you see, no war in progress — only a sordid struggle for commercial advantage in selling poison to heathens. Their sullenness probably arises from a belief that our Captain is a murderous, fucking little maniac.”

I thought about this carefully; slowly, too, for I had drunk my share of the Van Der Hum. At last I said, “And Peter, is our Captain, in fact, a murderous, fucking little maniac?”

Peter rose to his feet, stoney-faced, his eyes like ice.

“Mr Van Cleef,” he said, in a thin, unpleasant voice, “I shall, since you are my mess-mate, pretend that I did not hear that question. However, I cannot promise that I shall overlook any future impertinences of the kind.”

After collecting my thoughts, I too rose. I bowed, but only from the neck, as I had seen Lord Windermere bow.

“I apologise, Lord Stevenage,” I said stiffly. “Pray believe that it was the wine which spoke and not I.”

“Sit down, Karli, there’s a good fellow. And my name’s Peter. And let us kill this bottle before it kills us.”

We drank — in perfect friendship. I shall never understand the English. (There was a time when I thought that I would never understand women , but now, after having owned and trained perhaps twenty spaniels, the female mind is an open book to me. All they ask from life is something to adore and fear: it is as simple as that. But the English men — no one will ever understand them, least of all their women. It is, of course, possible that there is nothing to understand and perhaps, too, that is their great strength. Who can tell?)

By the time Orace entered to put me into my nightshirt I was in the mood to throw pieces of Italian sausage at him and he stalked out, looking very English although but a bastard and small of stature. Peter and I finished the bottle and fell asleep in our clothes. He probably washed his face first, for he was English, English.

The last leg of our passage to Calcutta was “sailed large” for we caught the first of the hot, south-west monsoon and snored up the Coromandel Coast in great style, the sea making a pleasing hiss under our forefoot as it shored through the swell. Not a reef would the Captain allow in her sails although, when the wind stiffened at nightfall, he would sometimes reluctantly have the royals stowed.

From time to time, when no one could observe, I made something of a friend of the strange Irish O’Casey. (I say “when no one could observe” because I was, you see, an officer and he but a common seaman and, to boot, not even English, although he spoke a tongue of which many of the words seemed to be English.) His gift of language was enviable; he could hold me spellbound by the hour although I did not understand one half of what he said. Better, he had great store of mournful ballads, all evincing a terrible homesickness for his land, which is an island off the coast of England, just as England is an island off the coast of Holland. Although, whenever he had a few pounds in his pocket after a voyage, he would go to his home and lord it as long as the money lasted, he would always sing of it as though he was an eternal exile. I remember, but indistinctly, many of these sad songs; in particular one in which he vowed to cross the sea to Ireland even at the closing of his days in order to see the women in the uplands dropping praties on the gossoons making water in the bog. I did not understand this wish but it never failed to bring tears to my eyes. There will one day be an Irish Empire, you may depend upon it.