by Multatuli
“On Digging a Channel through the Isthmus of Suez, and Its Consequences.”
“On Payment of Land Tax in Kind.”
“On Growing Coffee in Manado.” (I have already mentioned this.)
“On the Rupture of the Roman Empire.”
“On German Gemütlichkeit.”
“On the Scandinavian Edda.”
“On the Duty of France to Create a Counterforce to the English in the Indies Archipelago.” (This was in French, I don’t know why.)
“On Making Vinegar.”
“On the Veneration of Schiller and Goethe by the German Middle Classes.”
“On Man’s Claim to Happiness.”
“On the Right to Rebel against Oppression.” (This was in the language of Java; I didn’t discover what the title meant until afterwards.)
“On Ministerial Responsibility.”
“On Certain Points of Criminal Law.”
“On the Right of a People to Demand That the Taxes Paid by Them Be Used for Their Benefit.” (In Javanese, again.)
“On the double A and the Greek ETA.”
“On the Existence of an Impersonal God in the Hearts of Men.” (An infamous lie!)
“On Style.”
“On a Constitution for the Realm of Insulindia.” (I have never heard of that realm.)
“On the Lack of Ephelcystics in Our Rules of Grammar.”
“On Pedantry.” (I think this piece was written with considerable expertise.)
“On What Europe Owes to the Portuguese.”
“On the Sounds of the Forest.”
“On the Flammability of Water.” (I think he means firewater.)
“On Milky Seas.” (I have never heard of them; apparently they’re somewhere around Banda.)
“On Seers and Prophets.”
“On Electricity as a Motive Force, without Soft-Iron.”
“On the Ebb and Flow of Civilization.”
“On Epidemic Degradation in National Economies.”
“On Chartered Trading Companies.” (This contains various things I need for my book.)
“On Etymology as a Resource for Ethnological Studies.”
“On the Birds’ Nest Cliffs on the South Coast of Java.”
“On the Place Where a New Day Begins.” (I don’t understand this.)
“On Personal Understanding as Standard of Responsibility in the Moral Domain.” (Ridiculous! He’s saying that every man must be his own judge. Whatever next?)
“On Gallantry.”
“On Hebrew Versification.”
“On the Century of Inventions Compiled by the 2nd Marquis of Worcester.”
“On the Frugal Eating Habits of the Islanders of Roti near Timor.” (Life must be cheap there.)
“On the Man-Eating Batak, and Head-Hunting among the Alfuros.”
“On the Distrust of Public Morality.” (I think he wants to abolish locksmiths. I am against that.)
“On ‘Law’ as Opposed to ‘Rights.’ ”
“On Béranger as a Philosopher.” (Again something I don’t understand.)
“On the Malayans’ Dislike of the Javanese.”
“On the Worthless Instruction at So-Called Universities.”
“On the Loveless Spirit of Our Forebears, as Shown by Their Notions of God.” (Yet another ungodly piece!)
“On the Interrelation of the Senses.” (True enough: when I saw him I smelt attar of roses.)
“On the Taproot of the Coffee Tree.” (I have put this to one side for my book.)
“On Sentiment, Sensibility, Empfindelei, Etc.”
“On Confounding Mythology and Religion.”
“On Palm Wine in the Moluccas.”
“On the Future of Dutch Trade.” (It was this piece that inspired me to write my book. He says the big coffee auctions are on their way out, and I live for my trade.)
“On Genesis.” (An infamous piece!)
“On the Secret Societies of the Chinese.”
“On Drawing as a Natural Form of Writing.” (He says newborn infants can draw!)
“On Truth in Poetry.” (Of course!)
“On the Unpopularity of Rice Mills in Java.”
“On the Link between Poetry and Mathematics.”
“On Chinese Shadow Plays.”
“On the Price of Java Coffee.” (I have put this to one side.)
“On a European Currency.”
“On the Irrigation of Common Lands.”
“On the Influence of Racial Mixing on the Mind.”
“On the Balance of Trade.” (Here he discusses premiums on bills of exchange; I have put it to one side for my book.)
“On the Continuity of Asian Customs.” (He maintains that Jesus wore a turban.)
“On the Ideas of Malthus Regarding the Relationship between Population and Means of Subsistence.”
“On the Original Inhabitants of the Americas.”
“On the Piers and Breakwaters of Batavia, Semarang, and Surabaya.”
“On Architecture as the Expression of Ideas.”
“On the Relationship between European Officials and the Regents of Java.” (Part of this will be going into in my book.)
“On Living in Cellars in Amsterdam.”
“On the Power of Delusion.”
“On the Unemployment of a Supreme Being in the Case of Natural Laws Being Perfect.”
“On the Salt Monopoly in Java.”
“On Worms in the Sago Palm.” (People eat them, he says . . . ugh!)
“On Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, and the Javanese Pantun Verses.”
“On the Jus Primi Occupantis.”
“On the Poverty of the Art of Painting.”
“On the Immorality of Angling.” (Whoever heard of such a thing?)
“On the Crimes of Europeans outside Europe.”
“On the Defenses of the Weaker Animal Species.”
“On the Jus Talionis.” (Yet another infamy! With a poem in it that would have horrified me had I read it to the end.)5
And this was not all! I also found—aside from the poems, which came in various languages—several batches without headings, romances in Malay,6 battle songs in Javanese, and so forth. I also found letters, many of them in languages unknown to me. Some were addressed to him, others written by him, or rather, they were copies he had made, for they bore the signatures of other parties certifying that they were identical to the original.7 I came across excerpts of journals, notes, and random jottings . . . some of them very random indeed.
I have already mentioned that I had put a few batches to one side, thinking they might come in handy for my business, and my business is my life. But I have to admit that I was in a quandary as to what to do with all the rest. I couldn’t send the parcel back because I didn’t know where he lived. Besides, it had been opened. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t taken a look inside, nor would I have wished to, for I care about the truth. Nor did I manage to rewrap the parcel so you couldn’t tell it had been tampered with. And I can’t deny it: there were some writings devoted to coffee that interested me, and I wanted to make use of them. I read a couple of pages at random every day, and became more and more—Frits says “the more,” but not I—more and more convinced, I say, that it takes a coffee broker to make such a pertinent discovery about what goes on in the world. I am sure the Rosemeyers, who are in sugar, have never laid eyes on anything like this.
I began to dread that Shawlman fellow suddenly turning up again and demanding to speak to me. I regretted having turned right into that alley the other evening, and realized yet again how wrong it is to stray from the path of respectability. He would have asked for money, of course, and mentioned his parcel. I might even have given him some, and if he had sent me that mass of writing the following day it would have been legally mine.8 Then I could have separated the wheat from the chaff, keeping what I needed for my book and burning the rest, or throwing it in the wastepaper basket, which I couldn’t do under the circumstances. Because if he did return I would h
ave been obliged to hand back the parcel, and then he, noticing my interest in certain of his papers, would surely have asked too high a price. There’s no greater advantage to the seller than knowledge of the buyer’s need for his wares. That is precisely the state of affairs every buyer worth his salt is at pains to avoid.
Another thing that occurred to me—I’ve mentioned it before—which shows how spending time at the Exchange can make a man more alert, was the following. Of late, Bastiaans—he’s the third clerk and getting old and doddery—has been coming into the office scarcely twenty-five days out of thirty, and when he does turn up his work is often poor. As an honest man I owe it to the firm—Burden & Co, now that the Meyers have left—to ensure that everyone does his job properly, and not to squander company funds out of misguided pity or sentimentality. That is my principle. I’d rather give Bastiaans three guilders out of my own pocket than go on paying him an annual wage of seven hundred guilders he no longer deserves. I’ve calculated that over the last thirty-four years the fellow has received—from Burden & Co, and previously from Burden & Meyer, but the Meyers have left now—an income of nearly fifteen thousand guilders. Not at all bad for a common man—few of his peers can boast the same, so he has nothing to complain about. It was Shawlman’s piece about multiplication that motivated me to make this calculation.
That fellow Shawlman’s handwriting is pretty good, I thought to myself. Besides, he looked down-at-heel, and didn’t know the time of day . . . what if I gave him Bastiaans’s position? In that case I’d tell him to address me as Mr. Drystubble—he probably wouldn’t need to be told, as an employee can hardly be expected to address his boss by just his surname—and he could be settled for life. He could start with four or five hundred guilders—it took our Bastiaans a good many years to get up to seven hundred—and that would be doing him a favor. Even three hundred guilders would be enough to start with, as he hasn’t been in business before and could therefore regard the first years as an apprenticeship—that would be quite reasonable, given that he can’t consider himself equal to people with several years of experience at the job. Indeed, I daresay he’d be content with two hundred guilders. But I wasn’t too sure about his attitude . . . what with that shawl he was wearing. And besides, I didn’t know where he lived.
A few days later young Stern and Frits went to a book sale.9 I had forbidden Frits to buy anything, but Stern, who has plenty of pocket money, came home with a few trifles. That’s his affair. But then Frits said he’d seen Shawlman at the sale, and that he appeared to be employed there, taking books from the cases and sliding them down the long table towards the auctioneer. Frits said he looked very pale, and that someone who appeared to be in charge had reprimanded him for dropping some bound volumes of the Aglaia magazine—which was very clumsy of him in my opinion, considering that those volumes contained the finest ladies’ handiwork patterns. Marie shares a copy with the Rosemeyers, who are in sugar. She uses it—the Aglaia I mean—for her tatting. But in the course of the reprimand Frits overheard that he was earning fifteen stivers a day. “Don’t think I’m going to waste fifteen stivers a day on you!” the man had said. I reckoned that a daily wage of fifteen stivers—I assume Sundays and holidays don’t count, or he’d have mentioned a monthly or annual wage—amounts to two hundred and twenty-five guilders a year. I made a quick decision—when you’ve been in business as long as I have you always know what to do in a flash—and early next morning I went to see Leecher, the bookseller holding the sale. I asked about the man who’d dropped the Aglaia.
“He’s been sacked,” Leecher said. “He was lazy, sickly, and pedantic.”
I bought a box of paper seals and resolved there and then not to be too hard on Bastiaans. I couldn’t bring myself to turn the old man out into the street just like that. It has always been a principle of mine to be strict, but lenient where possible. I never miss an opportunity to garner information that might be of use to my business, which was why I asked Leecher where that fellow Shawlman lived. He told me the address, and I wrote it down.
My book was uppermost in my mind, but loving the truth as I do I must confess I was at a loss how to go about writing it. One thing was clear: the primary materials I had encountered in Shawlman’s parcel were of importance to coffee brokers. The only question was how to sort and rearrange those materials in a suitable way. Every coffee broker knows how important it is for the batches to be properly sorted.
But writing—aside from business correspondence—is not my strong suit, and yet I felt it my duty to write, as the future of the profession might depend on it. The nature of the information contained in Shawlman’s papers was such that Burden & Co couldn’t rightfully keep it to itself. Otherwise, as everyone will understand, I wouldn’t take the trouble of publishing a book that would also be read by Busselinck & Waterman, because only a fool would do anything to help a competitor. That’s a firm principle of mine. No, it dawned on me that the entire coffee market is under threat, a threat that can only be averted by the concerted efforts of all brokers, and that it’s even possible that those efforts won’t be enough, so that the sugar-bakers—Frits says refiners, but I say sugar-bakers, as do the Rosemeyers, and they should know as they’re in sugar themselves, and besides, we say bad ideas are half-baked, not half-refined—that the sugar-bakers, then, as well as the indigo traders, will have to do their bit.
Reflecting on this as I write, it seems to me that even shipping will be affected to some extent, as well as the merchant navy . . . indeed, I’m quite certain of it! And sailmakers too, and the minister of finance, and the governors of the almshouses, and the other bigwigs, and pastry cooks, and haberdashers, and women, and shipwrights, and wholesalers, and retailers, and caretakers, and gardeners too.
And—how curious, the way thoughts arise as one writes—my book will also concern millers, and churchmen, and sellers of Holloway’s pills, and distillers, and tile makers, and people who live off government bonds, and pump makers, and rope makers, and weavers, and butchers, and the clerks in the brokers’ offices, and the shareholders of the Dutch Trading Company, and, all things considered, everybody else as well.
And the King too . . . yes, especially the King!
My book must go out into the world. No two ways about it! Never mind if Busselinck & Waterman get to read it too . . . I’m not one to bear grudges. Still, they’re cheats, they’re undercutters, and so say I! I told young Stern as much today, when I introduced him at Artis. He’s welcome to write and tell his father so, too.
Until a few days ago I was in a proper fix over my book, but then Frits helped me out. I didn’t tell him, because I don’t believe in letting on when one is beholden to anyone—a principle of mine—but it was true nonetheless. He said Stern was a very clever fellow, that he was making rapid progress in our language, and that he’d translated several of Shawlman’s German poems into Dutch. As you see, it’s an upside-down world in my house: a Hollander writing things in German, and a German translating them into Dutch. If each had kept to his own language it would have saved a whole lot of trouble. Then I thought, what if I can get Stern to write my book? If I have anything to add to it I can write a chapter myself from time to time. Frits can help too. He has a list of words that are hard to spell, and Marie can make a fair copy—of the book, I mean. That will safeguard the reader against all immorality. For as I’m sure you understand, no respectable broker would confront his daughter with anything at odds with good morals and decency.
I told the two boys about my plan, and they agreed. But Stern, who like many Germans has literary leanings, seemed to want to have a say in the manner of execution. I was a little put out by that, but as the spring auction is near and I still haven’t had any orders from Ludwig Stern, I didn’t want to oppose him too openly. He said: “When my chest glows with feeling for truth and beauty, nothing on earth can stop me sounding the notes that match such feelings, and I prefer to remain silent than see my words degraded by the shackles of the common”—Frits
says “commonplace,” but I don’t: too long. I thought this most peculiar of Stern, but my profession always comes first with me, and his old man runs a fine business. So we settled on the following:
1. That he would supply a few chapters for my book each week.
2. That I would change nothing in his writing.
3. That Frits would correct the grammar.
4. That I would write a chapter now and then, to make the book look more substantial.
5. That the title would be The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company.
6. That Marie would make a fair copy for the printer, but that we would bear with her when the laundry needed sorting.
7. That the finished chapters would be read out at our weekly gatherings.
8. That all immorality would be avoided.
9. That my name would not appear on the title page, because I am a broker.
10. That Stern would be allowed to publish German, French, and English translations of my book, because (so he claimed) such works are better understood abroad than at home.
11. That I would send Shawlman a ream of paper, a gross of pens, and a large bottle of ink. (Stern was very insistent on this point.)
I agreed to everything, as my book was very urgent. Stern produced his first chapter the next day, and lo, reader, the answer to the question of how a coffee broker—Burden & Co, No 37 Lauriergracht—comes to write a book that resembles a novel.
However, hardly had Stern set to work than he ran into difficulties. Aside from the problem of selecting and rearranging items from such an abundance of material, he kept coming across words and expressions he didn’t understand, and neither did I. They were mostly in Javanese or Malay. And here and there abbreviations had been used, which were hard to make sense of. I could see that we were going to need Shawlman, and as I believe a young man should be shielded from undesirable contacts, I didn’t want to send either Stern or Frits. I took some sweets left over from last week’s gathering—I am ever prepared—and went to call on him. His home was by no means lavish, but then the notion of equality for all men, up to and including their living conditions, is an illusion. He said so himself in his essay on the right to happiness. Anyway, I don’t like malcontents.