All the Tea in China: A Novel by Kyril Bonfiglioli

Author:Kyril Bonfiglioli [Bonfiglioli, Kyril]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, FIC002000, FIC047000
ISBN: 9781468307894
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2008-07-30T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.