Max Havelaar (Siebenhaar)/Chapter 6
Controller Verbrugge was a good man. When one looked at him, as he sat there in his blue cloth uniform, with embroidered oak and orange branches on the collar and cuffs, one could not fail to recognize in him the type prevalent among the Dutch in India . . . a type, it may be remarked in passing, which differs considerably from the Dutch in Holland. Indolent as long as there was nothing to do, and quite free from all the fussiness which in Europe counts for zeal, but zealous where action was necessary . . . simple and cordial towards all who belonged to his entourage, communicative, obliging and hospitable . . . well-mannered without stiffness . . . receptive to good impressions . . . honest and sincere, without however any inclination to become a martyr to these qualities . . . in a word, he was a man who would impress one anywhere as being in the right place, although no one would suggest that he would leave his mark on the age, an honour which certainly also he would not have sought.
He sat in the centre of the pendoppo at the table, which was covered with a white table-cloth and laden with dishes. Now and then he more or less impatiently asked the mandoor-orderly, i.e. the officer in charge of the police and office-attendants at the assistant-residency, using the words of Mrs. Bluebeard’s sister, whether no one was coming yet. Then he would get up, try in vain to rattle his spurs on the firm-trodden clay floor of the pendoppo, light his cigar for the twentieth time, and sit down again disappointed. He spoke little.
And yet he might have spoken, for he was not alone. In saying this I do not exactly refer to the company of the twenty or thirty Javanese servants, mantrees, and orderlies, who sat outside the pendoppo squatting on the ground, nor to the many who were continually running in and out, nor to the large number of natives of all ranks who respectively either held the horses or rode them about . . . no, the Regent of Lebak himself, Radhen Adhipatti Karta Natta Negara, was seated opposite him.
Waiting is always tiresome. A quarter of an hour seems an hour, an hour half a day, and so on. . . . Verbrugge might very well have been a little more talkative. The Regent of Lebak was a well-bred old man, who could talk on many subjects with intelligence and judgment. One had only to look at him to be convinced that the majority of the Europeans who came into contact with him could have learnt more from him than he from them. His vivacious dark eyes contradicted by their fire the lassitude of his features and the whiteness of his hair. What he said was usually well thought out—a characteristic which, for that matter, is common to pretty well all orientals of breeding—and when in conversation with him, one felt that one had to look upon his words as though they were parts of letters, minutes of which were kept in his archives for reference if required. This may probably seem rather unpleasant to those who are not accustomed to intercourse with Javanese grandees, yet it is not difficult to avoid all subjects of conversation that may give offence, especially as they themselves will never brusquely seek to change the course of the dialogue, which would militate against the Eastern conception of good form. He, therefore, who has reason to avoid touching upon any special point, need only talk about insignificant trifles, and he may rest assured that a Javanese chief will not, by any undesired turn in the conversation, take him where he would rather not be led.
There are, it is true, divergent opinions as to the best manner of dealing with those chiefs. But it seems to me that natural straightforwardness, without any attempt at diplomatic cautiousness, deserves the preference.
Anyhow, Verbrugge began with a trivial remark about the weather and the rain.
“Yes, it is the west monsoon,” said the Regent.
This, of course, Verbrugge knew quite well: it was January. But what he had said about the rain was equally well-known to the Regent. After this another brief silence. The Regent, with a scarce perceptible movement of his head, beckoned one of the servants who sat squatting at the entrance of the pendoppo. A little boy, charmingly attired in a blue velvet coatee, white pants, with a gilt belt which held his sarong[1] round the loins, and on his head the attractive kain kapala,[2] below which his black eyes peeped out mischievously, crept in a crouching position to the feet of the Regent, put down the golden box containing the tobacco, the lime, the seeree,[3] the penang,[4] and the gambeer,[5] made the slamat,[6] by raising both hands joined to his deeply bowed forehead, and then offered his master the precious box.
“The road must be difficult after so much rain,” said the Regent, as though to supply an explanation of the long wait. While speaking he spread some lime on a betel-leaf.[7]
“In Pandeglang the road is not so bad,” answered Verbrugge, who, if it may be assumed that he had no intention of touching on any offensive subject, surely made this reply somewhat thoughtlessly. For he should have remembered that a Regent of Lebak cannot be pleased to hear the roads of Pandeglang praised, even though they should in reality be better than those in Lebak.
The Adhipatti did not make the mistake of answering too quickly. The little maas[8] had already crept backward in a crouching position as far as the entrance of the pendoppo, where he took his place among his mates . . . the Regent had already dyed his lips and few remaining teeth brown-red with the juice of his seeree, before he said:
“Yes, there are a good many people in Pandeglang.”
For those who knew the Regent and Controller, for those to whom the conditions in Lebak were no secret, it would have been plainly evident that the conversation had already become a battle. For an allusion to the better condition of the roads in a neighbouring division appeared to be the sequel to unsuccessful attempts at getting constructed in Lebak also such better roads, or having the existing ones kept in better repair. But in this respect the Regent was right, Pandeglang was more densely populated, especially in proportion to its much smaller area, and therefore the labour on the main roads, with united forces, was much lighter than in Lebak, a division which, covering some hundreds of square miles, had only seventy thousand inhabitants.
“That is true,” said Verbrugge, “ we have only a small number of people here, but . . .”
The Adhipatti looked at him as though expecting an attack. He knew that after this “but” something might follow that would sound unpleasant to him, who had been Regent of Lebak for thirty years. It appeared, however, that for the moment Verbrugge had no inclination to continue the battle. At any rate he broke off the conversation, and again asked the mandoor-orderly whether he saw no one coming.
“I see nothing yet in the direction of Pandeglang, Sir, but yonder from the opposite side comes someone on horseback . . . it is the toowan commendaan.”[9]
“Quite right, Dongso,” said Verbrugge, looking out, “that is the commandant! He is hunting about here, and went out early this morning. Eh! Duclari . . . Duclari!”
“He has heard you, Sir, he is coming this way. His boy is riding after him, with a kidang[10] behind him on the horse.”
“Pegang koodahnya toowan commendaan,”[11] was Verbrugge’s order to one of the servants crouching outside. “Morning, Duclari! Are you wet? What is the bag? Come in!”
A vigorous-looking man of about thirty, sturdy and soldierly in appearance, although there was not a vestige of uniform about him, entered the pendoppo. It was Lieutenant Duclari, commandant of the small garrison of Rangkas-Betoong. Verbrugge and he were friends, and their intimacy was the greater as, for some time already, Duclari had been staying at Verbrugge’s house, while awaiting the completion of a new fortress. He shook hands with his host, saluted the Regent courteously, and sat down with the question: “Well, what things have you got?”
“Will you take tea, Duclari?”
“No, thanks, I am already warm enough! Haven’t you any coco-nut milk? That’s fresher.”
“I shall not let them give you any. When one is warm, coco-nut milk is, I think, very bad. It makes one stiff and rheumatic. Just look at the coolies who carry heavy loads across the mountains: they keep themselves alert and supple by drinking hot water, or koppee dahoon. But ginger tea is still better.” . . .
“What? Koppee dahoon, tea made of coffee-leaves? I've never seen that.”
“That’s because you have not lived in Sumatra. There it is quite the custom.”
“Very well, give me tea then . . . but not made of coffee-leaves or ginger. Oh, yes, you have lived in Sumatra, and so has the new Assistant-Resident, hasn’t he?”
This conversation was carried on in Dutch, which language the Regent did not understand. Whether Duclari felt that there was some discourtesy in thus keeping him outside the discourse, or whether he had some other reason, he suddenly continued in Malay, addressing the Regent.
“Do you know, Adhipatti, that Mr. Verbrugge knows the new Assistant-Resident?”
“No, no!” interrupted Verbrugge, “that is not what I said, for I have never seen him. He served in Sumatra some years before me. I only told you that I heard a good deal about him there, nothing more!”
“Well, that comes to the same thing. One need not exactly see a man to know him. What do you think about it, Adhipatti?”
The Adhipatti just wanted to call a servant. A moment passed, therefore, before he could say: “I agree with you, Commandant, but still in many cases it is necessary to see a person before you can form an opinion about him.”
“This may be true in general,” Duclari now went on in Dutch—either because he was more familiar with that language, and considered that he had done enough to satisfy the requirements of courtesy, or because he wished to be understood by Verbrugge alone—“this may be true in general, but with regard to Havelaar one certainly doesn’t require a personal acquaintance . . . he is a fool!”
“I never said that, Duclari!”
“No, you did not say it, but I do, after all you have told me about him. I call a man who jumps into the water to save a dog from sharks, a fool.”
“Well, of course, it was not sensible. But . . .”
“And just look here, that bit of poetry against General Vandamme . . . that wasn’t right!”
“It was witty . . .”
“Admitted! But a young man has no business to be witty at the expense of a general.”
“Don’t forget that he was still very young . . . it is fourteen years ago. He was only twenty-two then.”
“And then the turkey he stole!”
“That was to annoy the general.”
“Exactly! A young man has no business to annoy a general, who, in addition, was in this case, as civil governor, his chief. The other bit of verse I thought amusing, but . . . those everlasting duels!”
“That was usually in defence of someone else. He always took the side of the weaker.”
“Well, let everyone fight duels for himself, if one is determined to do so! As for me, I consider that duels are rarely necessary. If unavoidable, I should be prepared to accept a challenge, and in certain cases even be the challenger, but to make that sort of thing an everyday business . . . no, thanks! Let us hope he may have changed in that respect.”
“O, certainly, there is no doubt of that! He is so much older now, and then he has been married for years, and Assistant-Resident for quite a long time. Besides, I always heard it said that he had a kind heart, and a warm corner in it for justice.”
“Well, that will stand him in good stead in Lebak! Something has just happened to me that . . . do you think the Regent understands us?”
“I don’t think so. But show me something out of your bag, then he will think it is that which we are talking about.”
Duclari took his game bag, drew from it a couple of wood-pigeons, and feeling those birds as though he was talking about shooting, he told Verbrugge that only a moment ago a Javanese had run after him and asked him whether he could do nothing to lighten the burdens laid upon the population.
“And,” he continued, “this is very serious, Verbrugge! Not that I am astonished at the thing itself. I have been long enough in Bantam to know what happens here; but that a Javanese from among the populace, who is usually so cautious and reticent as regards his chiefs, asks such a thing from a person who is in no way directly concerned with it, this seems amazing to me!”
“And what did you answer?”
“Well, I said it was not my business! I told him to go to you, or to the new Assistant-Resident, when he should have arrived at Rangkas-Betoong, and lay his complaints there.”
“Eenee apa toowan toowan-datang!”[12] called suddenly the orderly Dongso. “I see a mantree who is waving his toodoong.”[13]
All rose. Duclari, who did not wish his presence in the pendoppo to be interpreted as if he also were on the boundary to welcome the Assistant-Resident, the latter being, though his superior, not his chief, and moreover “a fool,” Duclari mounted his horse and rode away, followed by his servant.
The Adhipatti and Verbrugge placed themselves at the entrance of the pendoppo, and saw a travelling-coach coming which was drawn by four horses, and which, pretty well covered with mud, presently stopped near the little bamboo building.
It would have been difficult to guess all that the coach contained, before Dongso, assisted by the “runners” and a number of servants belonging to the retinue of the Regent, had unfastened all the straps and knots that held the carriage enclosed with a black leather covering, reminding one of the caution with which in earlier days lions and tigers were brought into a town, when the zoological gardens were still travelling menageries. Now there were no lions and tigers in the coach. The only reason why everything had been so carefully closed up was the west monsoon, which compelled one to be ready for rain. To descend from a travelling-coach in which one has for a long time jolted along the road, is not so easy as people who have never or rarely travelled in one might imagine. More or less as is the case with the poor prehistoric Saurians, which by dint of waiting long enough have at last come to form an integral portion of the clay wherein originally they had not taken up their abode with any intention of remaining, so also, with travellers who have sat too long in a travelling-coach, closely packed and in a cramped position, something takes place that I propose to call assimilation. One finally no longer knows precisely where the leather cushion of the carriage ends, and where the ego begins; in fact the idea has sometimes occurred to me that in such a coach one might have a toothache or a cramp which one might mistake for moth-holes in the cloth or vice versa.
There are few circumstances in the material world that do not give thinking Man occasion to make observations on the intellectual plane; and I have often asked myself whether many errors that among men have the force of law, many crooked notions that we mistake for rectitude, might possibly result from the fact that men have too long sat with the same company in the same travelling-coach. The leg which you had to push out to the left between the hat-box and the basket of cherries . . . the knee you held pressed against the carriage door, so that the lady opposite might not think you intended an attack on crinoline or virtue . . . the foot with corns that was so frightened of the heels of the commercial traveller next to you . . . the neck you were so long compelled to turn to the left because there was a drip on the right of you . . . all these, you see, must in the end become necks, knees, and feet that have something distorted about them. I think it is a good thing now and then to change carriages or seats or fellow passengers. It enables one to turn one’s neck in another direction, one can from time to time move one’s knee, and perhaps sometimes for a change one may have next to one a lady with dancing shoes, or a little boy whose short legs do not reach the floor. It gives one a better chance of seeing straight and walking upright as soon as one has once more the solid ground under one’s feet.
Now I do not know whether in the coach which stopped in front of the pendoppo there was anything that opposed the “solution of continuity,” but there is no doubt that it took a long time before anything emerged from it. It seemed that a battle of courtesies was going on. One heard the words: “If you please, Mrs. Havelaar!” and “Resident!” However, at last a gentleman descended, who both in bearing and appearance showed a suggestion of the Saurians I spoke about just now. As we shall see him again, I may as well tell you at once that his immobility could not exclusively be attributed to assimilation with the travelling-coach, for, even when there was no carriage anywhere near for miles, he still displayed a calmness, a slowness, and a cautiousness, which would make many a Saurian envious, and which in the eyes of a large number of people are the hallmarks of gentility, of composure, and of wisdom. He was, like most Europeans in India, very pale, which, however, in those regions is in no way considered as evidence of unsatisfactory health, and he had delicate features which bore testimony to some intellectual training. Only there was something cold in his glance, something that reminded one of a table of logarithms, and though in general his appearance was in no way unpleasant or repellent, one could not refrain from the suspicion that his rather large thin nose felt bored in that face where so little happened.
He offered his hand courteously to a lady, assisting her to alight from the carriage, and when she had taken a child, a little fair boy of about three, from a gentleman still inside, they entered the pendoppo. After them came the second gentleman just referred to, and with people acquainted with Java it would have attracted notice that he waited at the carriage door to make the descent easier to an old Javanese baboo. Three servants had themselves managed to get free from the patent leather box that was stuck on to the back of the coach like a young oyster to the back of its mamma.
The gentleman who had descended first had offered his hand to the Regent and to Verbrugge, and they had taken it respectfully; their whole demeanour had made it apparent that they felt themselves in the presence of an important personage. He was the Resident of Bantam, the extensive region of which Lebak is a division, a regency, or, as it is called officially, an assistant-residency.
In reading fictitious stories I have often felt irritated by the little respect the authors paid to the public’s good taste, and this was especially the case whenever they manifested the wish to produce something that was to be considered amusing or burlesque, not to say humorous, a quality which people almost invariably confuse with the comical. They introduce a person speaking, who either does not understand the language or pronounces it badly; for instance one makes a Frenchman say: “I sink ze sree soroughfares are all srown open,” or “ze vidow vants to vait for a vidover.” In the absence of a Frenchman, one takes someone who stammers, or one “creates” a person who makes a hobby of a couple of ever-returning words. I have seen a perfectly idiotic vaudeville “make a hit” because there was a man in it who kept repeating: “My name is Meyer.” Such wit is just a bit cheap, and to tell you the truth, I should be angry with you if you could find it amusing. But now it is my misfortune that I myself have to put something like this before you. From time to time I have to make someone “walk on”—I will promise to do it as little as possible—who indeed had a style of speech which I fear will draw upon me the suspicion of an abortive effort at making you laugh. And I must therefore most emphatically assure you that it is not my fault, if the eminently important-looking Resident of Bantam, who is here referred to, had something so very peculiar in his mode of speaking that I find it difficult to reproduce it without the appearance of seeking an effect of wit in a stage trick. He expressed himself in such a way as to give the idea that there was a full stop after each word, or even a prolonged rest, and I can compare the space between his words with nothing better than the silence that succeeds the “amen” after a long prayer in the church, which, as everyone knows, is a signal that one has permission to move in one’s seat, or cough, or blow one’s nose. What he said was usually well considered, and if he could have broken himself of the habit of these untimely resting-points, his sentences, at any rate from a rhetorical point of view, would mostly have appeared quite sound. But all this crumbling up, this jerkiness and unevenness rendered it irksome to listen to him. And often it made one stumble. For usually, when one had begun to answer under the amiable impression that the sentence was finished, and that he left the completion of the part omitted to the sagacity of his audience, the still missing words would come along behind like the stragglers of a defeated army, and made you feel that you had interrupted him, which is always a disagreeable experience. The public of the chief centre, Serang, in so far as they were not in government service—a position which gives the majority an air of caution—described his discourses as “slimy.” I don’t consider this a tasteful word, but am bound to admit that it expressed the chief characteristic of the Resident’s eloquence pretty accurately.
I have said nothing yet about Max Havelaar and his wife—for these were the two persons who got out of the coach with their child and the baboo, after the Resident—and it might be sufficient to leave the description of their appearance and character to the course of events and the reader’s own imagination. As, however, I have now started to describe, I will tell you that Mrs. Havelaar was not beautiful, but that in look and speech she had something very sweet, and that by the easy freedom of her manners she gave unmistakable evidence of having moved in the world, and of belonging to the higher classes of society. She had none of the stiffness and unpleasingness of middle-class gentility which, in order to pass as “distinguished,” imagines it must needs aggravate itself and others with shyness; also she attached but little importance to the appearances that seem to have a certain value for most women. In her dress she was a pattern of simplicity. A white baadjoo of muslin with a blue wrapper—I believe in Europe one would call a garment of this kind a peignoir—completed her travelling costume. Round her neck she wore a thin silk cord, to which were attached two small medallions, unseen however, as they were concealed in the folds that covered her breast. For the remainder, her hair à la chinoise, and a small spray of melatti[14] in her kondeh[15] . . . such was her complete toilet.
I said she was not beautiful, and yet I should not like you to think her the reverse. I trust you will think her beautiful as soon as I shall have had the opportunity of representing her, burning with indignation about that which she called the “neglect of genius,” when her adored Max was concerned, or when she was animated by a thought connected with the well-being of her child. It has too often been said that the face is the mirror of the soul, for any one to value the portrait-beauty of a face whose immobility mirrors nothing because no soul is reflected in it. Let me say, then, that she had a beautiful soul, and one must have been blind not also to consider beautiful the face in which that soul might be read.
Havelaar was a man of thirty-five. He was slim, and alert in his movements. There was nothing remarkable in his appearance except his short and mobile upper lip and his large pale blue eyes, which, when he was in a calm mood, looked dreamy, but which shot fire when a great idea took possession of him. His fair hair hung smoothly over his temples, and I quite understand that few people, seeing him for the first time, would get the impression that they had met a man who, as regards both head and heart, belonged to the rare ones of the earth. He was a “vessel of contradictions.” Keen as a stiletto, yet gentle as a young girl, he himself was always the first to feel the wound his bitter words had inflicted, and he suffered more from it than the injured one. He was quick to understand; he grasped at once what was highest and most complicated; he delighted in solving difficult problems, and gladly devoted to this task labour and study, and intense exertions; . . . and yet often he could not understand the simplest thing, which a child might have explained to him. Full of the love of truth and justice, he often neglected his nearest and most obvious duty, in order to redress a wrong that lay higher, farther, or deeper, and that allured him by the probable need for greater effort in the struggle. He was chivalrous and brave, but often, like the other Don Quixote, wasted his valour on a windmill. He burned with insatiable ambition, which made all ordinary distinction among his fellow men appear to him worthless, and yet he placed his greatest happiness in a calm and obscure home-life. A poet in the highest conception of the word, he dreamt solar systems in a spark, peopled them with beings of his own creation, felt himself lord of a world he himself had called into existence . . . yet could perfectly well immediately after carry on, without the slightest dreaminess, a discourse on the price of food, the rules of grammar, or the economic advantages of an Egyptian poultry-farm. No science was wholly foreign to him. He presurmised what he did not know, and he possessed in a high degree the faculty of applying the little he knew—everyone knows but little, and he, though perhaps knowing more than some others, was no exception to this rule—applying the little he knew in a manner which multiplied the measure of his knowledge. He was strict and orderly, and with it unusually patient, but precisely so because strictness, order and patience were naturally difficult to him, as his mind had a tendency to the fanciful. He was slow and circumspect in forming an opinion, although this scarcely seemed so to those who heard him so hastily expressing his conclusions. His impressions were too vivid for people to look upon them as enduring, and yet he often proved that they were so. All that was great and exalted drew him, and at the same time he was simple and naive as a child. He was honest, especially where honesty ran into magnanimity, and would leave unpaid hundreds that he owed, because be had given away thousands. He was witty and entertaining when he felt that his wit was understood, but otherwise distant and reserved. Warm-hearted with his friends, he made—sometimes too readily—friends of all that suffered. He was sensitive to love and affection . . . faithful to his word once given . . . weak in small things, but firm to stubbornness where he deemed it worth while to show character . . . modest and gracious with those who recognized his mental superiority, but difficult when people attempted to dispute it . . . candid out of pride, and reticent by fits, when he feared that his candour might be taken for stupidity . . . equally susceptible to sensual as to mental pleasure . . . timorous and ill-spoken when he thought he was not understood, but eloquent when he felt that his words fell into receptive soil . . . sluggish when he was not urged by any spur from his own soul, but zealous, fiery and resolute when he was so urged . . . furthermore, he was affable, refined in manner, and irreproachable in his conduct: such, approximately, was Havelaar!
I say: approximately. For if all definitions are difficult in themselves, this becomes even more so when it is a question of describing a person who deviates greatly from the everyday norm. And no doubt this is the reason why novelists usually make their heroes devils or angels. Black or white is easy to paint, but far more difficult is the exact reproduction of the shades that lie between, when one is bound by the truth, and may therefore make the colours neither too dark nor too light. I feel that the sketch I have tried to give of Havelaar is entirely incomplete. The materials before me are so divergent in nature that by their excess of wealth they hamper my judgment; and probably, therefore, while unfolding the events I wish to relate, I shall revert to them for their completion. This is certain, he was an uncommon man, and well worth the trouble of studying. Already now I notice that I have neglected to give, as one of his principal traits, that he grasped the ludicrous and the serious side of things with the same rapidity and at the same time, from which characteristic his mode of speech derived, without his knowing it, a kind of humour, leaving his audience in continual doubt as to whether they had been struck by the deep feeling that animated his words, or whether they had to laugh about the absurdity which all of a sudden interrupted their earnestness.
It was remarkable that his appearance, and even his emotions, showed so few traces of the things he had gone through in his life. Boasting of one’s experience has become a ridiculous commonplace. There are people who for fifty or sixty years have drifted along with the little stream wherein they have pretended to swim, and who can tell little else of all this time than that they moved from the A-quay to the B-street. Nothing is of more usual occurrence than to hear people pride themselves on their experience, and especially those people who have obtained their white hair very easily. Others again think they may found their claims to experience on real vicissitudes undergone, although it does not appear from anything that those changes gripped them in their soul-life. I can imagine that to be present at, or even to undergo, important events has little or no influence on a certain type of disposition, unequipped with the capacity for receiving and digesting impressions. If anyone doubt this, let him ask himself whether he would be justified in ascribing experience to all the inhabitants of France who were forty or fifty in 1815. And yet all of these were persons who not only had seen the stupendous drama that began with 1789 staged, but who had even taken part in that drama in some more or less weighty rôle.
And, vice versa, how many undergo a series of emotions without the outward circumstances appearing to give occasion for it! One may remember the Crusoe novels, Silvio Pellico’s Captivity, Saintine’s charming Picciola, the struggle in the breast of an “old maid” who all her life long hugged one love without ever betraying by one single word what went on in her heart, or finally, the emotions of a humanitarian who, without externally being concerned in the course of events, nevertheless takes a burning interest in the well-being of his fellow citizens or fellow men. One may imagine how that humanitarian hopes and fears alternately, how he watches every change, how he enthuses over a beautiful idea, and burns with indignation when he sees it pushed out of the way and trampled upon by the many who, for a moment at any rate, are stronger than beautiful ideas. One may think of the philosopher who, from the seclusion of his cell, tries to teach the people what is truth, when he has to experience that his voice is drowned by the clatter of pietistic hypocrisy or gain-hunting quackery. One may picture Socrates—not while drinking the cup of hemlock, for I wish to refer to the experience of the soul, not that which comes direct from external circumstances—how deeply grieved his heart must have been when he, who strove to find truth and goodness, heard himself called “a corrupter of youth and reviler of the gods.”
Or even better: one may think of Jesus when so sadly gazing upon Jerusalem, and lamenting that her people “would not” take heed.
So bitter a cry of grief—before the poisoned cup or the crostree—comes not from an unpierced eart. There it is that suffering has been, great suffering; there is the true experience!
This philippic has escaped me . . . well, it is down, and will stay. Havelaar had experienced much. Shall I give you something that may balance the removal from the “A-quay”? He had been shipwrecked more than once. In his diary there were fire, rebellion, assassination, war, duels, luxury, poverty, hunger, cholera, love and “loves.” He had visited many lands, and had intercourse with people of every kind of race, rank, customs, prejudices, religion, and colour.
Therefore, as regards the circumstances of life, he could have experienced much. And that he had really experienced much, that he had not gone through life without seizing the impressions that it offered him so bountifully—for this the alertness of his mind might go bail, as well as the receptiveness of his heart.
Now it filled with amazement all those who knew or could guess how much he had witnessed and gone through, that so little of it was to be read in his face. Doubtless there was in his features something like weariness, but this rather suggested premature growth than approaching age—and yet it should have been approaching age, for in India a man of thirty-five is no longer young.
As I have said, even his emotions had remained young. He could play with a child, and like a child, and often he complained that “little Max” was still too young to fly kites, as he, “big Max,” was so fond of it. With boys he would play at leap-frog, and he delighted in drawing patterns for the girls’ fancy work. He would even take the needle out of their hand to amuse himself with such work, although he often said they might be doing something better than “mechanically counting stitches.” With young men of eighteen he was a young student who gladly joined them in singing “Patriam canimus” or “Gaudeamus igitur” . . . ay, I am not quite certain whether shortly since, when he was on furlough in Amsterdam, he had not pulled down a signboard that displeased him, because on it was painted a Negro chained at the feet of a European with a long pipe in his mouth, and underneath the inevitable words: “The smoking young merchant.”
The baboo whom he had assisted out of the coach resembled all the other baboos in India when they are old. If you know this type of servant, I need not tell you what she looked like. And if you do not know it, I cannot tell you. Only this there was to distinguish her from other nurse-maids in India, that she had very little to do. For Mrs. Havelaar was a pattern of care for her child, and whatever had to be done for or with little Max, she did herself, to the great astonishment of many other ladies who did not approve of one being “a slave to one’s children.”
- ↑ Wrapper.
- ↑ Head-wrapper.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 A leaf which is chewed.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 A nut chewed with the seeree.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 A further vegetable addition to the preceding.
- ↑ Greeting.
- ↑ Betel is the combination of [3], [4], and [5].
- ↑ Page.
- ↑ Lord Commandant.
- ↑ Small deer.
- ↑ “Go and hold the horse of the Lord Commandant.”
- ↑ “The gentlemen are just coming!”
- ↑ Large hat.
- ↑ Javanese flower.
- ↑ Hair-knot.