Anecdotes of Destiny and Ehrengard (16 page)

I
N THE SIXTIES of the last century there lived in Canton an immensely rich tea-trader, whose name was Mr. Clay.

He was a tall, dry and close old man. He had a magnificent house and a splendid equipage, and he sat in the midst of both, erect, silent and alone.

Amongst the other Europeans of Canton Mr. Clay had the name of an iron-hard man and a miser. People kept away from him. His looks, voice and manner, more than anything actually known against him, had made him this reputation. All the same two or three stories about him, many times repeated, seemed to bear out the general opinion of the man. One of the stories ran as follows:

Fifteen years ago a French merchant, who at one time had been Mr. Clay’s partner but later, after a quarrel between them, had started on his own, was ruined by unlucky speculations. As a last chance he tried to get a consignment of tea on board the clipper
Thermopylae
, which lay in the harbor ready to go under way. But he owed Mr. Clay the sum of three hundred guineas, and his creditor laid hands on the tea, got his own shipment of tea off with the
Thermopylae
, and by this move finally ruined his rival. The Frenchman lost all, his house was sold, and he was thrown upon the streets with his family. When he saw no way out of his misfortune he committed suicide.

The French merchant had been a talented, genial man; he had had a lovely wife and a big family. Now that, in the eyes of his friends, he was contrasted with the stony figure of Mr. Clay, he began to shine with a halo of gay and gentle rays, and they started a collection of money for his widow. But
owing to the rivalry between the French and English communities of Canton it did not come to much, and after a short time the French lady and her children disappeared from the horizon of their acquaintances.

Mr. Clay took over the dead man’s house, a big beautiful villa with a large garden in which peacocks strutted on the lawns. He was living in it today.

In the course of time this story had taken the character of a myth. Monsieur Dupont, it was told, on the last day of his life had called together his pretty, gentle wife and his bright young children. Since all their misery, he declared, had risen from the moment when he first set eyes on the face of Mr. Clay, he now bound them by a solemn vow never, in any place or under any circumstance, to look into that face again. It was also told that when he had been about to leave his house, of which he was very proud, he had burnt or smashed up every object of art in it, asserting that no thing made for the embellishment of life would ever consent to live with the new master of the house. But he had left in all the rooms the tall gilt-framed looking-glasses brought out from France, which till now had reflected only gay and affectionate scenes, with the words that it should be his murderer’s punishment to meet, wherever he went, a portrait of the hangman.

Mr. Clay settled in the house, and sat down to dine in solitude, face to face with his portrait. It is doubtful whether he was ever aware of the lack of friendliness in his surroundings, for the idea of friendliness had never entered into his scheme of life. If things had been left entirely to himself, he would have arranged them in the same way; it was only natural that he should believe them to be as they were because he had willed them to be so. Slowly, in his career as a nabob, Mr. Clay had come to have faith in his own omnipotence.
Other great merchants of Canton held the same faith in regard to themselves and, like Mr. Clay, kept it up by ignoring that part of the world which lay outside the sphere of their power.

By the time that Mr. Clay was seventy years old he fell ill with the gout, and for a long time was almost paralyzed. The pain was so severe that he could not sleep at nights, and his nights then seemed infinitely long.

Late one night it happened that one of Mr. Clay’s young clerks came to his house with a pile of accounts that he had been revising. The old man in his bed heard him talk to the servants, he sent for him and made him go through the account books with him. When the morning came he found that this night had passed less slowly than the others. So the next evening he again sent for the young clerk, and again made him read out his books to him.

From this time it became an established rule that the young man should make his appearance in the huge, richly furnished bedroom by nine o’clock, to sit by his old employer’s bedside and read out, by the light of a candle, the bills, contracts and estimates of Mr. Clay’s business. He had a sonorous voice, but toward morning it would grow a little hoarse. This vexed Mr. Clay, who in his young days had had sharp ears, but was now getting hard of hearing. He told his clerk that he was paying him to do this work and that, if he could not do it well, he would dismiss him and take on another reader.

When the two had come to the end of the books now in use at the office, the old man sighed and turned his head on the pillow. The clerk thought the matter over; he went to the lockers and took out books five, ten and fifteen years old, and these he read out, word for word, during the hours of the night. Mr. Clay listened attentively; the reading
brought back to him schemes and triumphs of the past. But the nights were long; in the course of time the reader ran short even of such old books and had to read the same things over again.

One morning when the young man had for the third time gone through a deal of twenty years ago, and was about to go home to bed himself, Mr. Clay held him back, and seemed to have something on his mind. The workings of his master’s mind were always of great moment to the clerk; he stayed on a little to give the old man time to find words for what he wanted.

After a while Mr. Clay asked him, reluctantly and as if himself uneasy and doubtful, whether he had not heard of other kinds of books. The clerk answered no, he had no knowledge of other kinds of books, but he would find them if Mr. Clay would explain to him what he meant. Mr. Clay in the same hesitating manner told him that he had in mind books and accounts, not of deals or bargains, but of other things which people at times had put down, and which other people did at times read. The clerk reflected upon the matter and repeated, no, he had never heard of such books. Here the talk ended, and the clerk took his leave. On his way home the young man turned Mr. Clay’s question over in his mind. He felt that it had been uttered out of some deep need, half against the speaker’s own will, with bashfulness and even with shame. If the clerk had himself had any sense of shame in his nature he might have left his old employer at that, and have wiped his one slip from dignity off his memory. But since he had nothing of this quality in him he began to ponder the matter. The demand, surely, was a symptom of weakness in the old man; it might even be a foreboding of death. What would be, he reflected, the consequence to him himself of such a state of things?

The young clerk who had been reading to Mr. Clay was known to the other accountants of the office as Ellis Lewis, but this was not his real name. He was named Elishama Levinsky. He had given himself a new name, not—like some other people in those days emigrating to China—in order to cover up any trespass or crime of his own, he had done it to obliterate crimes committed against himself, and a past of hard trials.

He was a Jew and had been born in Poland. His people had all been killed in the big Pogrom of 1848, at a time when he himself had been, he believed, six years old. Other Polish Jews, who had managed to escape, had happened to carry him with them among other sad and ragged bundles. Since that time, like some little parcel of goods in small demand, he had been carried and dropped, set against a wall and forgotten, and after a while once more flung about.

A lost and lonely child, wholly in the hands of chance, he had gone through strange sufferings in Frankfort, Amsterdam, London and Lisbon. Things not to be recounted and hardly to be recalled still moved, like big deep-water fish, in the depths of his dark mind. In London chance had put him in the hands of an ingenious old Italian bookkeeper, who had taught him to read and write, and who had, before he died, in one year implanted in him as much knowledge of bookkeeping by double entry as other people will acquire in ten years. Later the boy was lifted up and shifted eastward, where in the end he was set down in Mr. Clay’s office in Canton. Here he sat by his desk, like a tool ground upon the grindstone of life to an exceedingly sharp edge, with eyes and ears like a lynx, and without any illusions whatever of the world or of humanity.

With this equipment Elishama might have made a career for himself, and might have been a highly dangerous person to meet and deal with. But it was not so, and the reason for the apparently illogical state of things was the total lack of ambition in the boy’s own soul. Desire, in any form, had been washed, bleached and burnt out of him before he had learned to read. To look at, he was a fairly ordinary young man, small, slim and very dark, with veiled brown eyes, and might have passed as a citizen of any nation. Mentally he had nothing of a youth, but all of a precocious child or a very old man. He had no softness or fullness in him, no yearning for love or adventure, no sense of competition, no fear and no wish to fight. Outwardly and inwardly he was like some kind of insect, an ant hard to crush even to the heel of a boot.

One passion he had, if passion it may be called—a fanatical craving for security and for being left alone. In its nature this feeling was akin to homesickness or to the instinct of the homing-pigeon. His soul was concentrated upon this one request: that he might enter his closet and shut his door, with the certainty that here no one could possibly follow or disturb him.

The closet which he entered, and to which he shut the door, was a modest place, a small dark room in a narrow street. Here he slept on an old sofa rented from his landlady. But in the room there were a few objects which did really belong to him—a painted, ink-stained table, two chairs and a chest. These objects to their owner were of great significance. Sometimes, in the night, he would light a small candle to lie and gaze at them, as if they proved to him that the world was still fairly safe. He would also, at night, draw comfort from the idea of the numeral series. He went over its figures—10, 20, 7000. They were all there, and he went to sleep.

Elishama, who despised the goods of this world, passed
his time from morning till night amongst greedy and covetous people, and had done so all his life. This to him was as it should be. He understood to a nicety the feelings of his surroundings, and he approved of them. For out of those feelings came, in the end, his closet with the door to it. If the world’s desperate struggle for gold and power were ever to cease, it was not certain that this room or this door would remain. So he used his talents to fan and stir up the fire of ambition and greed in people round him. He particularly fanned the fire of Mr. Clay’s ambition and greed, and watched it with an attentive eye.

Even before the time of their nocturnal readings there had existed between Mr. Clay and Elishama a kind of relation, a rare thing to both of them. It had first begun when Elishama had drawn Mr. Clay’s attention to the fact that he was being cheated by the people who bought his horses for him. Some unknown ancestor of Elishama’s had been a horse-dealer to Polish princes and magnates, and the young bookkeeper in Canton had all this old Jew’s knowledge of horses in his blood. He would not for anything in the world have been the owner of a horse himself, but he encouraged Mr. Clay’s vanity about his carriage and pair, from which, in the end, his own security might benefit. Mr. Clay on his side had been struck by the young man’s insight and judgment; he had left the superintendence of his stable to him and never been disappointed. They had had no other direct dealings, but Mr. Clay had become aware of Elishama’s existence, as Elishama had for a long time been aware of Mr. Clay’s.

The relationship showed itself in a particular way. It might have been observed that neither of the two ever spoke about the other to anybody else. In both the old and the young man this was a breach of habit. For Mr. Clay constantly fretted over his young staff to his overseers, and Elishama had such
a sharp tongue that his remarks about the great and small merchants of Canton had become proverbial in the storehouses and the offices. In this way the master and the servant seemed to be standing back to back, facing the rest of the world, and did indeed, unknowingly, behave exactly as they would have behaved had they been father and son.

In his own room Elishama now thought of Mr. Clay, and put him down as a greater fool than he had held him to be. But after a time he rose to make a cup of tea—a luxury which he permitted himself when he came back from his nightly readings—and while he drank it, his mind began to move in a different way. He took up Mr. Clay’s question for serious consideration. It was possible, he reflected, that such books as Mr. Clay had asked about did really exist. He was accustomed to getting Mr. Clay the things he wanted. If these books existed, he must look out for them, and even if they were rare he would find them in the end.