This person evidently understood English, for he waived my Spanish aside and began to talk very fast in pidgin, which, when you hear the real thing, and not on the stage at home, is very difficult to understand. However, he seemed to bring the word “wests” in pretty often, so I began to feel hopeful, and made the old man draw a chair up to the counter for me, and sat down.
Presently, after a fearful lot of talk with several other fat, yellow youths, and a great deal of hauling down and putting away again of bales and boxes, and sharp rebukes from another old Chinaman with a bead counting-board, who was doing his accounts in a big book with Indian ink and a paint brush, the boy who was attending to me came back to where I sat, and threw down a pile of big, flat bundles with a triumphant air, exclaiming “Wests!”
No such luck, however, for the bundles contained coloured furniture cretonnes. So I set to work to explain again, but it was not so easy as it had been in the Spanish shops, for no one, as far as I could see, had on such a thing as a vest, an open coat being the most they wore above the waist line. I did not dare to go out and make a demonstration with the coachman, so I just struggled along with pantomime and bits of French and German, which really did just as well as English or Spanish; till at last a light dawned on a Celestial brain, and they all said some word in Chinese to each other, and nodded and grinned and replied: “Allitee, Mississy. Have got.”
And at last a box was opened, inside which were really and truly white cotton vests. But the size was unfortunately intended for very small and consumptive youths, so I had to begin another long and troublesome explanation that the person they were intended for was forty-two inches round the chest, which was conveyed by calculations and juggling with a metre tape.
“Ah,” said the two old men. “Can catchee flom Hong Kong. All same steamer. You waitee two tlee days.”
I said I knew that already, and explained that I was going to Iloilo to-morrow.
“Velly good,” said one old man. “Mollow can get. Catchee flom one piecee Chinaman in Manila.”
“Can’t I go to the other Chinaman myself?” I asked.
“Me catchee wests. Mollow can get number one size west.”
However, while this was going on, a bright idea had evidently occurred to one of the shop boys, who had been looking so hard at me that I thought he was ill; but he suddenly left the shop, going out of a doorway with big Chinese letters in gold on a red placard over it, and came back, just as I was leaving the shop, with the very things I wanted—a dozen of them in a big cardboard box.