Opas squatted in a corner to wait for the letter to be written. Before many moments had passed Boomsmer’s sandy head appeared round the door.
“Well, what did the tuan Besar want with you?” he asked. “Nothing, nothing at all,” Visser said. “Only the usual nonsense.” “So you say,” Boomsmer observed. “The first commandment in the Colonies is that nothing is without consequence.”
“And so forth,” Visser said. “I know all you’re going to say by heart. Our honor is at stake, we are the masters and we insist on obedience, we think only of the good of the natives and this country belongs to the Netherlands. And now I will tell you something: that sort of talk merely inflames the situation. For heaven’s sake, leave the natives alone, and if they don’t care about corrugated sheet-iron and bicycles, why make them? They’re no use as plantation coolies either. It’s all a lot of damned nonsense.”
“You’re an anarchist,” Boomsmer said, and as Visser made no reply to this he withdrew again to his own room.
An hour later three two-wheeled vehicles drew up before the Residence, with a loud clinking of shining harness. In the first sat the gusti Nyoman himself. In the other two were Kwe Tik Tjiang and several of the gusti’s retinue. Nyoman walked quickly, though with dignity, up the garden and was greeted courteously on the stoep by the Resident. He took the proffered hand loosely and with some embarrassment, for he was not yet quite at home with the manners of the white men. His escort squatted on the stone steps, which gleamed with the true Dutch cleanliness; and this dissuaded the men from spraying them liberally with red betel-juice. The Chinese stood patiently at the foot of the steps; he was smiling and he looked hot in his silk robe.
The Resident offered the gusti a chair and the gusti sat on it cross-legged just as though it was his usual bamboo bench. He was a good-looking, strongly built young man, whose eyes showed that he was intelligent and energetic and resourceful. Also, with his silvery green sarong and brown bare feet, he wore a white tunic, buttoned to the chin, as the Dutch did. “The tuan sent for me and I am here,” he said in Malay. The Resident offered him a cigarette. “Ask the tuan Visser to come here,” he told the orderly who was crouching on the steps. “My friend Nyoman can tell him what the complaint of the Chinese is.”
Gusti Nyoman came of a noble family, but of a branch of it that was not quite without taint. He had gained his position in Buleleng by coming to an understanding with the Dutch. The other native lords called him a traitor behind his back and there was no love lost between him and them. They had treated him as a man of lower caste and an upstart until the Dutch put power in his hands. “I set no store by this Chinaman,” he said arrogantly, although Kwe Tik Tjiang was listening, “but since his complaint is with the lords of Badung and Pametjutan I thought it best to bring it to the ears of the tuan Resident.”
Visser at this moment stepped on to the stoep and after greeting the gusti sat down in silence at the table. He had brought his Javanese clerk, who squatted on the floor ready to take a minute of the proceedings. The Resident signalled to the Chinese to come nearer and plead his case; and Kwe Tik Tjiang, who was by now quite used to being his own advocate, opened out with great fluency.
When his boat struck, so his story ran, he was not for some hours in possession of his senses, since his head had struck the mast in the violence of the storm. Therefore the first mate had been in sole charge during that time. He himself asked the punggawa of Sanur to set a guard over the boat and in addition he left two of his own men on the beach. Also he had returned to the ship with the rest of the crew towards morning and had found about two hundred of the people of the coast breaking it up and plundering it. It was not in the power of him and his men to stop them. On boarding the ship at ebb-tide he found a large part of the cargo missing, including an iron chest containing ringits and several bamboo baskets in which were strings of Chinese kepengs, a thousand to each string. Next day, when the cargo was unshipped, further thefts came to light. Thereupon he made his complaint to the court of Badung, but was scornfully refused redress. It had occurred to him that in his first suit to the Resident he had not been sufficiently clear as to the extent of his losses. Now therefore he submitted a correct list of them and a report showing how they came about.
With this and a low bow he laid several sheets of paper written in Malay characters before the Resident.
The Resident read them through, passing each sheet when he had read it to the Controller. Visser went redder and redder in the face as he examined them, and now and then he whistled aloud without himself observing this breach of etiquette. The gusti sat and smoked with an air of sleepy amusement.
The document consisted of a long list of all that the merchant of Banjarmasin had lost, beginning with the chest containing 3,700 rix-dollars and ending with the cooking utensils of the cook Simin, of Banjarmasin, valued at five Dutch guilders. Then followed the sworn testimony of the crew, given in the presence of, and signed by, the harbor master of Singaraja.
The Resident reached for the document and read it through twice more and finally sighed. “Is that all?” he asked ironically. The Chinese bowed several times and produced another document from his wide sleeve, which he handed to the gusti, watching with expectant eyes as it pursued its course into the Resident’s hands. “Still more?” Visser muttered.
“A letter from the Chinese, Tan Suey Hin of Sanur,” the gusti said in a bored voice, “to the Chinese, Kwe Tik Tjiang.”
“Is it usual for Chinese to write each other letters in Malay?” Visser asked, after glancing hastily at the letter and seeing the Arabic characters. The Resident smiled pensively. “It announces that Tan Suey Hin can no longer buy up the wreck as marauders removed the copper plates and the shrouds after Twe Tik Tjiang left Sanur, leaving the wreck on the beach,” the Resident said to the Controller, winking as he spoke.
“Bad, too bad,” Mynheer Visser sighed hypocritically. The Chinese looked from one to the other and observed that they were not taking him seriously.
“The people of the coast of Badung behaved like wreckers,” he said bitterly. His disaster took on even larger proportions as time passed and, in any case, lying was part and parcel of his tortuous Chinese mentality.
“All this is quite new,” the Resident said. “There was nothing of all this in your first claim.” Visser bent forward to hear better. The Chinese did not reply. The Resident produced the earlier document and began to compare it with the new one. He shook his head and finally produced his spectacles, although he was loath to admit his short sight, and began again. At last he put the whole bunch down on the table and looked the Chinaman up and down.
“So you had three thousand seven hundred rix-dollars on board and two thousand nine hundred kepengs besides. How was it that nothing of all this money was rescued?” he asked.
“Kepengs to the value of a hundred and seventy-five guilders were recovered from the sea,” the Chinese said. “I have only entered my actual losses.”
“I see. The actual . . .” the Resident said abstractedly. “I read in your first statement that the crew when they were rescued carried some cases ashore with them. What did they contain?”
“Sugar,” the Chinese said.
“Oh—the sugar was rescued and the money left on the wreck,” the Resident observed. Gusti Nyoman laughed loudly. It seemed to him a good joke.
“Salt water destroys sugar——” the Chinese said. “I cannot say exactly what happened—I had hit my head on the mast——”
“One moment,” Visser said, stepping up to the Chinaman. “Are you certain that the case with all that money was on board when you left the ship?
