A Faithful Rendering

by Joseph Conrad, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The boat came up the river on the last of the flood, a little before noon, and the whole station turned out to watch it, as a station will that has seen nothing new for a month. Even the Resident's cook, a Hokkien with a scalded forearm who had never been known to leave his fire, came down to the end of the plank landing and stood there wiping his hands on his trousers. It was a long dug-out with a shelter of palm thatch amidships, paddled by six men who kept their eyes on the water; and under the thatch sat an old man in a jacket of faded green silk, holding upright on his knees, with both hands, a small box bound in brass. He did not look at the station. He looked at the box, or at nothing; and the paddles rose and dipped all together, with a sound like slow and reluctant applause.

"That's him," said Pryor, the Resident, from the shade of the verandah. "That's the Panglima. He's brought the dollars. I told you he would." He spoke with the satisfaction of a man whose prophecy has come true and who had not, until the boat came round the point, entirely believed in it himself. "You'll take his statement, Hollis. Daud will interpret. Get it all down, every word; the Governor will want it in full. I am not going to sit through it in this heat. I had enough of the old devil at Kampong Laut."

Hollis said that he would. He was twenty-six, the son of a clergyman in the Forest of Dean, and he had been two years on the river as the Resident's assistant, which is to say that he kept the station's accounts, the tax register, the police roll, the gaol book and the Resident's temper, and was paid for one of them. He had a long, fair, serious face which the sun had been unable to do anything with except redden; and he had, besides, a secret, which was that he had been learning Malay.

Not the bazaar Malay that every European on that coast picks up in a month, enough to order a meal, abuse a boatman and ask the way to a place he already knows, but the language itself, out of Marsden's Grammar, a fat brown book printed in the year 1812 which he had found among the effects of a predecessor who had died of fever at the station and had left nothing else worth sending home. He worked at it at night, under the lamp, with the moths beating on the chimney and the river talking to itself in the dark below the house. He told nobody. He was a little ashamed of it, as a young man is ashamed of a private enthusiasm; and he wished also, though he would not have put it so even to himself, to be able one day to astonish people. So for two years, at every complaint and every palaver, every haggle over a boat-licence or a strayed buffalo, he had stood at Daud's elbow and listened, and understood a little more each month, and kept his face as still as the interpreter's own.

There is a peculiar loneliness in understanding half of what is said in a room. The man who understands nothing is at peace; the noise goes over him like weather. But the man who catches one word in three lives in a perpetual suspense, leaning towards the sense like a man leaning over a well to hear whether a stone has struck bottom; and he begins, without knowing it, to supply the missing words out of his own head, which is to say out of his own expectations, which is to say out of nothing at all.

---

The affair of Kampong Laut had begun with a boat and ended with a fire, and between the two there was a dead man, which in the Company's territories was the only thing that made an affair out of a quarrel.

Six weeks before, a corporal of police, a tall, slow-spoken Sikh named Hira Singh, had gone down to the river mouth with two constables to collect the boat-tax from the village, which was a village of sea-people built on piles over the mud, where every family owned a boat as a family in Gloucestershire owns a kettle. What happened on the beach there nobody at the station could say with certainty. The constables said that a young man had attacked the corporal without provocation. The corporal said nothing, having been cut down with a parang and having died in the bottom of his own boat on the way upriver, with his turban unwound and his hands folded on his chest as if he had arranged them himself. He had been a good corporal. Hollis had liked him. He had once shown Hollis a photograph of his two daughters, taken in Amritsar, and had held it by the edges so as not to mark it.

A week later Pryor went down with twenty police and the station's steam-launch, and the village was punished. That was the word in the report, which Hollis had copied out fair in his own hand for the Governor at Sandakan: the village was punished, and its boats were holed, and two of the ringleaders fell while resisting. Hollis had not been there. He had stayed at the station with the accounts. But he had seen the launch come back with its brass all black with smoke, and he had seen the police wash their rifles on the landing, laughing and splashing one another like boys; and he had learned, in the course of copying the report, that a man may fall while resisting with a bullet in the back of his head, for the report gave the wounds, in fairness, and Pryor was a fair man according to his lights.

The young man who had used the parang had gone into the forest. The fine, which was three hundred dollars and the surrender of the culprit, had been demanded of the Panglima as the headman of the place; and now half of it had come up the river on the flood, in a brass-bound box, held on an old man's knees.

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They took the statement in the court-house, which was a shed with walls of plaited bamboo and a roof of thatch, a table, two chairs, a bench for the police and a picture of the Queen that had been nibbled at the corners by something in the night. Hollis sat at the table with the paper squared before him and three pens laid out in a row. Daud stood at his left hand. The Panglima had been offered the second chair and had looked at it for a moment as if it had been a dog of doubtful temper; then he had sat down on the floor, cross-legged, with the box beside him, and the six paddlers had sat down behind him against the wall, and the constable at the door had leaned his rifle on the jamb and yawned.

Daud bin Abdullah was a Brunei man of about forty, with a clipped grey moustache and a white drill jacket buttoned to the throat in all weathers, so that he gave the impression of a man permanently on the point of being photographed. He had been clerk to a Chinese merchant in Labuan and had learned his English at the mission school there, and his English was better than Pryor's, with fewer words in it and none of them wasted. He had a wife and a son in Labuan, to whom he sent money every month by the Company's steamer; the son was at the mission school in his turn, and Daud kept the receipts for the fees in a tin box with a lock, which he took out sometimes in the evening and went through, one by one, as other men tell their beads. He was paid forty dollars a month. Pryor called him the most valuable man on the coast and treated him like a piece of furniture; that is to say, he relied on him entirely and had never once thought about him.

"The Tuan will ask him to state what happened on the beach," said Hollis, "in his own words."

Daud put it into Malay. The old man listened without looking up. Then he began to speak, and Hollis, with his pen lifted, leaned towards the sense.

He spoke quietly and for a long time, in the clipped speech of the coast, which was not Marsden's speech, nor anything like it. He did not raise his voice. Once he touched the brass box with two fingers, lightly, as one touches the shoulder of a sleeping child. Hollis heard perahu, which is a boat; he heard cukai, which is a tax, and sudah bayar, which is already paid, and these three words came together and made a sense in his mind with a little shock, like the click of a lock. He heard anak saudara, which is a nephew, and pukul, which is to strike, and he heard the corporal's name, said carefully, with its two syllables given their full weight, as a man pronounces a word in a language not his own. The rest went past him like water.

When the old man stopped, Daud turned to the table.

"He says," Daud said, "that the young men of his village are foolish and hot in the head, and that his nephew is a bad young man who has always given trouble. He says the corporal was doing his duty. He says that he is very sorry that this thing has happened, and that the village has been punished as it deserved, and that he has brought one hundred and fifty dollars, which is all that can be found, and asks for time to find the rest. He asks the Tuan to tell the Tuan Besar that Kampong Laut will not give trouble again."

Hollis wrote it down. His hand did it for him, in the clear sloping clerk's hand his father had taught him at the kitchen table with a ruler; and while his hand wrote, his mind went back over the three words that had come together, and found them still together, and could not make them mean what Daud had said. He looked at the old man, who was looking at the floor. He looked at Daud, who was looking at the paper.

"Ask him," Hollis said, "whether the boat had paid its tax."

Daud asked. The old man raised his eyes for the first time, not to Daud but to Hollis, and kept them there; they were small, red-rimmed and perfectly steady, and there was in them neither fear nor anger but a kind of patient attention, the look of a man who is measuring the width of a creek before he jumps it. He answered in a few words; and then, still looking at Hollis, he said something else, slowly, almost gently, as though he knew that the young white man at the table was listening and wished to give him every chance.

"Kalau aku ada di situ, aku sendiri yang bunuh dia."

Hollis understood every word of it. It was the first sentence he had ever understood entire in that room, and it stood up in his mind as plain as a line of print, and for a moment he could not hear anything at all, not the river nor the cicadas nor the constable's boots shifting at the door. If I had been there, I myself would have killed him.

"He says the boat's paper was not in order," said Daud. "And he says that if he had been there he would have prevented it himself."

Hollis wrote that down too.

---

It was evening before he spoke to Daud. The boat had gone down on the ebb in the middle of the afternoon, with the box left behind on the court-house table and the old man sitting under the thatch with his empty hands upon his knees; Pryor had counted the dollars twice and pronounced himself satisfied, and had drunk a good deal of gin before dinner and gone to bed directly after it. The station was quiet. Down at the police lines somebody was playing a flute, the same four notes over and over, and the lamps of the Chinese shophouses across the water had come out one by one along the bank and lay on the river in long trembling strokes, like figures in a ledger that will not add up.

Daud was on the landing, where he went every evening to smoke one cigarette, and he did not turn round when Hollis came down the planks; but he said, "Tuan," quite pleasantly, to the dark, as though he had been expecting him for some time.

"You did not tell me what he said," said Hollis.

He had meant to say a great deal more. He had composed it in his room, walking up and down: something about duty, and the Governor, and the truth, which he had felt to be a fine thing as he walked and which now, on the landing, with the flute going and the warm smell of the mud coming up through the planks, he found had gone clean out of his head. He said only that, and waited.

Daud drew on his cigarette and let the smoke go slowly.

"Tuan has been learning," he said. "I know. Since the second month. When you hear a word you know, your lips move. Only a little, like this." He did it, very slightly, without mockery, as a doctor might show a patient how he walks. "Tuan Pryor's lips do not move. Tuan Pryor does not know that there are words. To him, it is like birds." He turned the cigarette in his fingers. "So. You heard the old man say he would have killed the corporal himself. And you heard about the boat. What else did you hear?"

Hollis did not answer, and Daud nodded, as if that were an answer.

"If I put that in the paper," he said, "the Tuan Besar in Sandakan reads it. He reads that the old man has said in the Company's court that he would kill the Company's police. Then the launch goes down again, and this time they do not want dollars. They want the old man. They take him to Sandakan and they hang him, very properly, with a paper. Then the young men of Kampong Laut go into the forest with the nephew, and next year, or the year after, another corporal goes down to collect the boat-tax, and he does not come back, and the launch goes down again. I have seen this. Not here. On another river, before you came to the country. It is like a sum, Tuan. You know sums. Every time, the same answer."

"That is not for you to decide."

"No," said Daud. "It is for the Tuan Besar to decide. But the Tuan Besar does not speak Malay, and the old man does not speak English. So who decides?" He let the question stand a moment, and then went on in the same even voice, not hurrying, as if he were reading out the items of an account he had kept for a long time and had never before been asked to show. "And it is not only the old man I make into a different man. It is you also. It is Tuan Pryor. When Tuan Pryor stood on the beach at Kampong Laut and said that they were dogs and the sons of dogs, and that he would burn every house from there to the hills, I told them that the Tuan was angry and that the Company was just. When you tell them a thing in your polite way, and it sounds to them like a threat, because in our language a thing said so quietly by a man with twenty rifles behind him is a threat, I make it sound like a promise. For two years I have been translating you also, Tuan. Every day. You think twenty police keep this river quiet? There are three hundred men with parangs between here and the hills. The police are twenty. I am one."

The flute stopped, and began again, and stopped.

"Why?" said Hollis.

He had not meant to ask it. It seemed to him afterwards the only honest thing he said that night; and Daud seemed to think so too, for he looked at him for the first time, and the look was not unkind.

"Not for you," he said. "Not for the Company. Not for the old man either, though he is my wife's cousin's husband's brother, which in Tuan's country is nothing and here is something. My son is at the mission school in Labuan. When he is finished he will go to Sandakan and be a clerk in the Company's office and sit at a table with a pen and wear shoes, and no one will ever ask him to stand on a beach and say that the Company is just. For that I need forty dollars every month, and a quiet river, and Tuan Pryor pleased with me. So." He dropped the end of the cigarette into the water, where it hissed once and was carried away. "You may write down what the old man said. You have the words. Some of the words. Write them, and send them to Sandakan, and then the Company will need another interpreter, and you can be the interpreter, Tuan, with your book."

He waited. Hollis said nothing. Across the river a woman laughed in one of the shophouses, a long laugh that went up and broke off.

"Shall I tell you what he said?" said Daud. "All of it? It took him a long time. There were things in it about the corporal, and about the beach, and about what the police did at Kampong Laut, after, that Tuan Pryor did not put in his report. I remember all of it. I can tell you now, every word, and you can write it down, and it will be true."

Hollis stood for a long while on the landing with his hands in his pockets, looking at the lights on the water. He thought, quite clearly, that this was the moment in which a man shows what he is made of, and he waited, with a kind of detached curiosity, to see what he would do; and what he did, in the end, was to say "Good night, Daud," in his ordinary voice, and go back up the planks to the house.

---

He made the fair copy that night, at the table in his room, under the lamp. He wrote it out entire, in the clear sloping hand, from the notes he had taken in the court-house: the foolish young men, the bad nephew, the corporal doing his duty, the village punished as it deserved, the hundred and fifty dollars, the plea for time. At the head of the sheet he wrote Statement of the Panglima Usop, headman of Kampong Laut, taken before me at the station on the 14th inst., through the Company's interpreter Daud bin Abdullah, and at the foot, after a moment, Certified a faithful rendering, and signed his name under it, and blotted it, and laid it on the pile for the morning steamer.

Pryor read it at breakfast, with his finger following the lines.

"Capital," he said. "Capital. That's the right tone exactly. The Governor will like that." And the Governor did like it, and sent it home; and Hollis heard, years afterwards, from a man who had been in the office in Sandakan, that it had been printed for the directors in London, among other papers, as an instance of the excellent feeling of the native chiefs towards the Company's administration, and that one of the directors, a baronet with an interest in tobacco, had been so struck by it that he had read it aloud.

But that was afterwards. On the night itself, when he had blotted the statement and laid it on the pile, Hollis sat for some time with his hands flat on the table, listening to the river. Then he got up, and took Marsden's Grammar down from the shelf above the bed, and wrapped it carefully in a square of oilcloth against the damp, folding the corners in as neatly as a parcel for the post; and he knelt, and opened his tin trunk, and put it in at the very bottom, beneath the heavy woollen things he had brought out from England for a winter that had never come, and closed the lid upon it, and turned the key.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Iōsēphō Conradō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Joseph Conrad, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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