Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (20 page)

“No, I thought so,” said Virginie. “For I see now who you are. When you came in, I thought that you were a small rat, out of Mr. Clay’s storehouses.
Mais toi—tu es le Juif Errant!”

Elishama gave her a quick deep glance from his veiled eyes and walked away.

On the night which Mr. Clay had destined for his story to materialize, the full moon shone down upon the city of Canton and the China Sea. It was an April night, the air was warm and sweet, and already innumerable bats were soundlessly swishing to and fro in it. The oleander bushes in Mr. Clay’s garden looked almost colorless in the moonlight; the wheels of his victoria made but a low whisper on the gravel of his drive.

Mr. Clay with much trouble had been dressed and got into his carriage. Now he sat in it gravely, erect against the silk
upholstering, in a black cloak and with a London top hat on his head. On the smaller seat opposite to him Elishama, cutting a less magnificent figure, silently watched his master’s face. This dying man was driving out to manifest his omnipotence, and to do the thing that could not be done.

They passed from the rich quarters of the town, with its villas and gardens, down into the streets by the harbor, where many people were about and the air was filled with noises and smells. At this time of day nobody was in a hurry; people walked about leisurely or stood still and talked together; the carriage had to drive along slowly. Here and there lamps in many colors were hung out from the houses like bright jewels in the pale evening air.

Mr. Clay from his seat looked sharply at the men on the pavement. He had never before watched the faces of men in the street; the situation was new to him and would not be repeated.

A lonely sailor came walking up the street, gazing about him, and Mr. Clay ordered Elishama to stop the carriage and accost him. So the clerk got out and under his master’s eye addressed the stranger.

“Good evening,” he said. “My master, in this carriage, requests me to tell you that you are a fine-looking sailor. He asks you wether you would like to earn five guineas tonight.”

“What is that?” said the sailor. Elishama repeated his phrase.

The sailor took a step toward the carriage to have a better look at the old man in it, then turned to Elishama. “Say that again, will you?” he said.

As Elishama spoke the words for the third time, the sailor’s mouth fell open. Suddenly he turned round and walked off as fast as he could, took the first turning into a side street and disappeared.

Upon a sign from Mr. Clay, Elishama got back into the carriage, and ordered the coachman to drive on.

A little farther on, a square-built young man with the look of a seaman was about to cross the street, and had to stop before the carriage; he and Mr. Clay looked each other in the face even before it halted. Elishama once more got out, and spoke to him in the same words as to the first sailor. This young man obviously came from a public house, and was somewhat unsteady on his legs. He too made the clerk repeat the sentence to him, but before Elishama had finished it the second time he burst out laughing and beat his thigh.

“Why, God help me!” he cried out. “This, I know, is what happens to a good-looking sailor when he visits the landlubbers. You need not say any more! I am coming with you, old master, and you have hit on the right man, too. Jesus Christ!”

He vaulted into the carriage by Mr. Clay’s side, stared at him, at Elishama and at the coachman, and let his hand run along the seat.

“All silk!” he cried out, laughing. “All silk and softness! And more to come!”

As they drove on he began to whistle, then took off his cap to cool his head. All at once he clapped both hands to his face and sat like that for a moment, then without a word jumped out of the carriage, began to run, and disappeared into a side street just as the first sailor had done.

Mr. Clay made the carriage turn and go back along the same street, then turn once more and drive back slowly. But he did not stop it again. He said nothing during the drive, and Elishama, who now kept his eyes off him, began to wonder if they were to drive like this all night. Then suddenly Mr. Clay ordered the coachman to return to the house.

They had already got out of the narrow streets near the harbor and on to the road leading to Mr. Clay’s house, when
three young sailors came straight toward them, arm in arm. As the carriage approached, the two at the sides let go their hold of the one in the middle and ran on leaving the last one in front of it.

Mr. Clay stopped the carriage and held up his hand to Elishama.

“I will get out myself this time,” he said.

Slowly and laboriously he descended upon the arm of his clerk, took a step toward the sailor, stood still before him as straight as a pillar, and poked his stick at him. When he spoke, his voice was hard and cracked, with a little deadly note to it.

“Good evening,” he said. “You are a fine-looking sailor. Do you want to earn five guineas tonight?”

The young sailor was tall, broad and large-limbed, with very big hands. His hair was so fair and stood out so long and thick round his head, that at first Elishama believed him to have on a white fur cap. He did not speak or move, but looked at Mr. Clay quietly and dully, somewhat in the manner of a young bull. In his right hand he carried a big bundle; he now shifted it over to the left and began to rub his free hand up and down his thigh as if at the next moment he meant to strike out a blow. But instead he reached out and took hold of Mr. Clay’s hand.

The old man swallowed, and repeated his proposal. “You are a fine-looking sailor, my young friend,” he said. “Do you want to earn five guineas tonight?”

The boy for a moment thought the question over. “Yes,” he said. “I want to earn five guineas. I was thinking about it just now, in what way I was to earn five guineas. I shall come with you, old gentleman.”

He spoke slowly, with a stop between each of his phrases and with a quaint, strong accent.

“Then,” said Mr. Clay, “you will get into my carriage. And when we arrive at my house I shall tell you more.”

The sailor set down his bundle on the bottom of the carriage, but did not get in himself. “No,” he said, “your carriage is too fine. My clothes are all dirty and tarred. I shall run beside, and I can go as fast as you.”

He placed his big hand on the mudguard, and as the carriage started he began to run. He kept pace with the two tall English horses all the way, and when they stopped at the front door of Mr. Clay’s house he did not seem to be much out of breath.

Mr. Clay’s Chinese servants came out to receive their master and to help him out of his carriage and his cloak, and the butler of the house, a fat and bald Chinaman all dressed in green silk, appeared on the verandah and held up a lantern on a long pole. In the golden light of the lamp Elishama took a look at the host and the guest.

Mr. Clay had strangely come to life. It was as if the young runner by his carriage had made his own old blood run freer; he even had a faint pink in his cheeks, like that of a painted woman. He was satisfied with his catch out of the harbor of Canton. And very likely there was not another fish of just that kind to be caught there.

The sailor was little more than a boy. He had a broad tanned face and clear light blue eyes. He was so very lean, his big bones showing wherever his clothes did not cover him, and his young face was so grave, that there was something uncanny about him, as about a man come from a dungeon. He was poorly dressed, in a blue shirt and a pair of canvas trousers, with bare feet in his old shoes. He lifted his bundle from the carriage and slowly followed the butler with the lantern into Mr. Clay’s house.

The lighted candles on the dinner table, in heavy silver candlesticks, were manifoldly reflected in the gilt-framed glasses on the walls, so that the whole long room glittered with a hundred little bright flames. The table was laid, the food ready and the bottles drawn.

To Elishama, who had come into the room last and had sat down silently on a chair at one end of it, the two diners and the servants going to and fro noiselessly, waiting on them, all looked like human figures in a picture seen at a great distance.

Mr. Clay had been helped into his pillow-filled armchair by the table, and here sat as erect as in the carriage. But the young sailor, slowly gazing round him, seemed afraid to touch anything in the room, and had had to be invited two or three times to sit down before he did so.

The old man by a movement of his hand told his butler to pour out wine for his companion, watched him as he drank, and all through the meal had his glass refilled. To keep him company he did even, against his habit, sip a little wine himself.

The first glass of wine had a quick and strong effect on the boy. As he put down the empty glass he suddenly blushed so deeply that his eyes seemed to water with the heat from his burning cheeks.

Mr. Clay in his armchair drew one profound sigh and coughed twice. When he began to speak his voice was low and a little hoarse; as he spoke, it became shriller and stronger. But all the time he spoke very slowly.

“Now, my young friend,” he said, “I am going to tell why I have fetched you, a poor sailor-boy, from a street by the
harbor. I am going to tell you why I have brought you to this house of mine, into which few people, even amongst the richest merchants of Canton, are ever allowed. Wait, and you shall hear all. For I have many things to tell you.”

He paused a little, drew in his breath, and continued:

“I am a rich man. I am the richest man in Canton. Some of the wealth which in the course of a long life I have made, is here in my house; more is in my storehouses, and more even is on the rivers and on the sea. My name in China is worth more money than you have ever heard of. When, in China or in England, they name me, they name a million pounds.”

Again there was a short pause.

Elishama reflected that so far Mr. Clay had recorded only such facts as had been long stored up in his mind, and he wondered how he would get on when he should have to move from the world of reality into that of imagination. For the old man, who in his long life had heard one story told, in his long life had never himself told a story, and had never pretended or dissimulated to anybody. When, however, Mr. Clay again took up his account, the clerk understood that he had on his mind more things of which he meant to clear it. Deep down within it there were ideas, perceptions, emotions even, of which he had never spoken and of which he could never have spoken, to any human being except to the nameless, barefooted boy before him. Elishama began to realize the value of what is named a comedy, in which a man may at last speak the truth.

“A million pounds,” Mr. Clay repeated. “That million pounds is me myself. It is my days and my years, it is my brain and my heart, it is my life. I am alone with it in this house. I have been alone with it for many years, and I have been happy that it should be so. For the human beings whom
in my life I have met and dealt with I have always disliked and despised. I have allowed few of them to touch my hand; I have allowed none of them to touch my money.

“And I have never,” he added thoughtfully, “like other rich merchants, dreaded that my fortune should not last as long as myself. For I have always known how to keep it tight, and how to make it multiply.

“But then lately,” he went on, “I have comprehended that I myself shall not last as long as my fortune. The moment will come, it is approaching, when we two shall have to part, when one half of me must go and the other half live on. Where and with whom, then, will it live on? Am I to let it fall into the hands which till now I have managed to keep off it, to be fingered and meddled with by those greedy and offensive hands? I would as soon let my body be fingered and meddled with by them. When at night I think of it I cannot sleep.

“I have not troubled,” he said, “to look for a hand into which I might like to deliver my possessions, for I know that no such hand exists in the world. But it has, in the end, occurred to me that it might give me pleasure to leave them in a hand which I myself had caused to exist.

“Had caused to exist,” he repeated slowly. “Caused to exist, and called forth. As I have begotten my fortune, my million pounds.

“For it was not my limbs that ached in the tea fields, in the mist of morning and the burning heat of midday. It was not my hand that was scorched on the hot iron-plates upon which the tea-leaves are dried. Not my hands that were torn in hauling taut the braces of the clipper, pressing her to her utmost speed. The starving coolies in the tea-fields, the dog-tired seamen on the middle watch, never knew that they were contributing to the making of a million pounds. To them the
minutes only, the pain in their hands, the hail-showers in their faces, and the poor copper coins of their wages had real existence. It was in my brain and by my will that this multitude of little things were combined and set to co-operate to make up one single thing: a million pounds. Have I not, then, legally begotten it?

“Thus, in combining the things of life and by making them co-operate according to my will, I may legally beget the hand into which I can with some pleasure leave my fortune, the lasting part of me.”

He was silent for a long time. Then he dipped his own old, skinny hand deep into his pocket, drew it out and looked at it. “Have you ever seen gold?” he asked the sailor.

“No,” said the boy. “I have heard of it from captains and supercargoes, who have seen it. But I have not seen it myself.”

“Hold out your hand,” said Mr. Clay.

The boy held out his big hand. On the back of it a cross, a heart and an anchor were tattooed.

“This,” said Mr. Clay, “is a five-guinea piece. The five guineas which you are to earn. It is gold.”

The sailor kept the coin on the flat of his hand, and for a while both looked at it concernedly. When Mr. Clay took his eyes off it he drank a little wine.

“I myself,” he said, “am hard, I am dry. I have always been so, and I would not have it otherwise. I have a distaste for the juices of the body. I do not like the sight of blood, I cannot drink milk, sweat is offensive to me, tears disgust me. In such things a man’s bones are dissolved. And in those relationships between people which they name fellowship, friendship or love, a man’s bones themselves are likewise dissolved. I did away with a partner of mine because I would not allow him to become my friend and dissolve my bones. But gold, my young sailor, is solid. It is hard, it is proof against
dissolution. Gold,” he repeated, a shadow of a smile passing over his face, “is solvency.”