Turnip Top
AT the stern of Turnip Top's big sampan—both ends were equally blunt, but I suspect it of having been the stern—there was a fine, long, curly sea-serpent with a scarlet tongue. And it was perhaps because of this that, when I came to select a boat for fishing among the rocky, sunlit coves of the Shansi shore, I unhesitatingly chose Turnip Top as my ghillie and advisory staff. On my calling for a sampan from the midst of that jostling Derby-crowd of boats that perpetually seethes about a British ship at anchor off the China coast, Turnip Top got alongside first. And that was certainly in his favour, too.
He had to crack one of his friends in a neighbouring sampan very hard on the head to do it—with an oar ; and he nearly capsized a sampan-load of yellow, varnished ducks in the ensuing mgMe. But he got along- side first. And the incident marked the beginning of our friendship. I came to know Turnip Top as one of the most delightful children it would be possible to imagine.
To him, as to his little grand-daughter in her flower- patterned jacket who would sometimes accompany him to sea, the whole world was one colossal joke—from myself, " the admilal," to the flat, sorry-looking fishes we would occasionally capture out of the bright emerald water of the sanded coves. " Him not happy, anyway," Turnip Top would murmur, as he gently unhooked the prize from our spinning minnow ; " much better makee die." And then he would smile with a sort of unhallowed glee as he held up the fish to show its mournful and incredibly repulsive face. Childishly thoughtless to the point of cruelty as Turnip Top could sometimes show himself, nevertheless he was a great lover of animals and birds. When, a long time ago, he had once fought for some War Lord or other against Somebody Else— that was all he knew about it—he had always carried with him, as he told. me, a " songing flush, vellee glate songer," in a wicker cage—a practice I afterwards discovered to be quite an established custom among the Chinese soldiery. It is in the same delightful spirit of insouciance that a skirmish between desperately antagonistic troops may be mutually, abandoned at its very hottest owing to some interfering shower of rain, and I have actually seen Chinese soldiers retiring in good order from their front-line trenches with all umbrellas up and no shot fired. Doubtless Turnip Top had been engaged in many a fierce tussle with his bird and his umbrella. It was a genuine love for the very great songer of a thrush that made him keep it, and he was plainly quite blind to the fact that it would have been happier set free. .
Turnip Top was no fool. He cut the best suit of white ducks I ever had—for he was a tailor as well as a fisherman, and although he was as trustful as a pigeon (" You no dollar now ? " he used to say. !` Allightee. Plenty time send dollar next year flom Eng-land "), he was .also the most profound and unwinking liar I have ever encountered. .To Turnip Top prevarication was the salt of life. The plain, unembroidered truth had no attraction for him whatsoever. " Top, _ you ought to be ashamed of yourself," I remember saying -to him one evening as we paddled home across the phosphorescent, violet-coloured water. " Why did you tell me the other- day that you had been four years in America when in fact you have never been out of china- in your life ? " It was a mere chance shot, but lucky. Turnip Top winced almost imperceptibly, seemed to consider the whole question gravely for a moment, and then broke into a delighted laugh. " You Where Turnip Top ? " he said eagerly—incidentally, he was inordinately proud of the name I had given him, and trotted it out on every possible occasion- " You t'ink he go Amellica ? All, Turnip Top he yell!, glate liar." And he chuckled as though there was nothing in the .world that could have pleased him better ; probably there was not. Which may help to explain, I think, why he was such a favourite with us all.
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