Max Havelaar (Nahuijs)/Chapter 13
[Composed by Stern.]
“And may we now hear why you were suspended?” asked Duclari.
“Oh yes; for as I can assure you of, and even prove, the truth of all that I say on the subject, you will see that I did not act rashly, when I, in telling the story about that lost child, did not quite disregard the scandal of Padang; because you will think it very credible, as soon as I shall have made you acquainted with this General in affairs that concern myself.
“There were in my accounts at Natal inaccuracies and omissions. You know how every inaccuracy ends in loss: inaccuracy never increases money. It is pretended that I was short of thousands. But, observe, they did not tell me that so long as I was at Natal. Quite unexpectedly I received an appointment in the highlands of Padang. You know, Verbrugge, that in Sumatra an appointment to the Padang highlands is considered as more profitable and more agreeable than one in the Northern Residency. As the Governor had visited me a short time before—by and by you will know why, and how—and things had happened in my house, in which I thought I had acted as a man; I accepted this appointment as a distinction, and set out from Natal for Padang. I made the passage on board a French ship, the ‘Baobab,’ of Marseilles, which had loaded pepper at Atchin, and, of course, on arriving at Natal was in want of fresh water. As soon as I arrived at Padang, with the intention to depart from there to the interior, I wished, as in duty bound, to visit the Governor, but he sent word that he could not receive me; and, at the same time, that I must delay my setting out for my new situation till further orders. You may believe that I was very much surprised at that,—the more so because he left me at Natal in a humour which made me think that he entertained a high opinion of me. I had but few acquaintances at Padang, but from the few I had, I heard, or rather perceived, that the General was very angry with me. I say that I perceived it, because, at a country place such as Padang was then, the goodwill of many can serve as a thermometer of the favour in which one stands in the eye of the Governor. I felt that a storm was near, without knowing from which point of the compass the wind would come. As I was in want of money, I asked one and another of my friends to lend me some, and was quite astonished that I was met everywhere by a refusal. At Padang, as everywhere else in the Indies, there is great liberality in this respect. In every other case, a few hundred guilders would have been lent with pleasure to a Controller who had been detained on his journey contrary to his expectations. But I was refused every assistance. I pressed some to tell me the cause of this distrust; and by little and little I got to know at last that in my money matters at Natal faults and oversights had been discovered, which now caused me to be suspected of dishonest administration. That there were faults in my administration I was not surprised to hear; the contrary would have surprised me; but I wondered that the Governor, who had himself witnessed how I had always to struggle far from my office with a discontented population, ready to revolt at any moment;—that he, who had himself given me credit for what he called ‘manliness,’ could accuse me of dishonesty, as he knew better than any one that there could be no other question than that of ‘force majeure.’ And though this force majeure was denied, though they wanted to make me responsible for faults that had happened at moments when I, often in danger of my life, far away from the cash or anything connected with it, had to intrust others with the administration of it,—even if it was expected that I, while doing one thing, ought not to have neglected the other, even then my only fault would have been a carelessness that had nothing in common with dishonesty. Moreover in those days there were many instances in which the Government took into consideration this difficult: position of their functionaries in Sumatra; and it seemed to be accepted as a principle on such occasions that some allowance should be made. It only required that these functionaries should make good the deficiency, and the word ‘dishonest’ was never pronounced without very clear proofs. This was so much a custom that I myself told the Governor at Natal, that I feared I should have to pay a good deal, after my account had been examined at the offices at Padang, whereupon he replied, shrugging his shoulders: ‘Ah! . . . those money matters. . .’ as if he himself felt that matters of smaller importance ought to give place to those of greater.
“I readily admit that money affairs are important; but, however important in themselves, they were in this case subordinate to other branches of duty and business. If through carelessness or oversight some thousands[1] failed in my administration, I call this no trifle; but if these thousands failed in consequence of my successful efforts to prevent a revolt, that would have devastated the district of Mandhéling with fire and, sword and that would have brought back the Atchinese to the haunts from where we had just driven them, with great sacrifice of blood and treasure, then the magnitude of the short-coming disappears, and it seems even a little unjust to make him refund who has saved infinitely more important interests. Yet I thought such a repayment right; for the non-exaction of it would lay one open to a charge of dishonesty.
“After waiting for many days, you may conceive with what feelings I received at last from the Governor's Secretary a letter, in which I was given to understand that I was suspected of dishonesty, and I was ordered to reply to a number of charges that had been made against my administration. Some of them I could explain immediately, for others I wanted to look at documents, and, above all, it was most important for me to look into these matters at Natal. I could have examined clerks and other employés, to ascertain the causes of the mistakes, and very likely I should have succeeded in my endeavours to clear up all. The neglect, for instance, to book money that had been sent to Mandhéling—[you know, Verbrugge, that the troops in the interior are paid out of the Natal exchequer]—or something like that, which I should, perhaps, have seen immediately, if I could have examined into it on the spot, as having been the cause of these sad faults. But the General refused to let me go to Natal. This refusal caused me to pay still more attention to the strange manner in which this accusation of dishonesty had been brought forward against me. Why had I been suddenly transferred from Natal, and under colour of good intentions to me, if I was really suspected of dishonesty? Why did they communicate to me that disgraceful suspicion only for the first time, when I was far from the place where I should have had an opportunity to clear myself? And above all, why had these affairs been brought against me in the most unfavourable light, contrary to the usual custom, and to justice?
“Before I had replied to all these observations as well as I could without written or verbal information, I learned that the reason why the General was so angry with me was—
“ ‘Because I had opposed him so much at Natal,’ in which, as was added, ‘I had done wrong.’
“Now, then, I saw it all. Yes, I had opposed him; but with the innocent idea that he would esteem me because I had opposed him; but after his departure nothing made me suppose that he was angry with me on that account; stupid as I was, I had accepted the favourable transfer to Padang as a proof that he had thought my opposition very noble. You will see how little I knew him then. But when I heard that this was the cause of the severity with which my money administration was condemned, I was at peace with myself. I answered every point as well as I could, and ended my letter, of which I still have a copy, with the words, ‘I have answered the observations made on my administration as well as is possible without consulting documents or having recourse to local investigation. I beg your honour, on all benevolent considerations, to excuse me. I am young and insignificant in comparison with the power of the dominant ideas, which my principles compel me to oppose; but I remain, nevertheless, proud of my moral independence, proud of my honour.’
“The following day I was suspended on the plea of dishonest administration. The officer of justice was ordered to fulfil my office and duty; and such was my position at Padang, when scarcely twenty-three years of age. I contemplated the future that must bring me infamy. People advised me to appeal on the score of my youth; for I was still under age when the pretended mistake occurred. But I would not do that. Had not I thought, suffered, and I daresay laboured too much already, to advance the plea of youth? You may see from the end of the letter above named, that I would not be treated as a child, I who had done my duty at Natal against the Governor, and like a man; and at the same time, you may perceive from this letter, how unfounded the accusation was which they brought to bear against me; for a guilty man writes in another style. I was not, however, taken into custody; though this ought to have been done, if this accusation had been well founded. Perhaps this apparent neglect was not without foundation, for a prisoner must be housed and fed. As I could not leave Padang, I was in reality still a prisoner, but a prisoner without shelter and without bread. I had often written, but without success, to the General, requesting that he would not prevent my departure from Padang, for, even supposing me to be guilty, no crime was punishable with starvation.
“After the Council of Justice, which was at a loss how to deal with the affair, had found a way out of the difficulty by declaring itself unable to decide, because a prosecution for crime in the service of the country could not be held without the authorization of the Government at Batavia, the General kept me, as I said, nine months at Padang.
“At last he himself received instructions from headquarters to let me set out for Batavia.
“A few years afterwards, when I had some moneydear Tine; you had given it meI paid some thousand guilders to clear the Natal accounts of 1841 and 1842, and then a person, who may be considered to represent the Government of the Dutch Indies, said, ‘I would, not have done that in your place. . . I should have drawn a bill of exchange on eternity.’
“Ainsi va le monde!”
Havelaar was about to recommence the narrative, which his guests expected from him; and wherein he was to explain in what and why he had so opposed General van Damme at Natal, when Madam Slotering appeared in her fore-gallery, beckoning to the policeman who sat on a bench near Havelaar’s house. The policeman went over to her, and then said something to a man who had just entered the grounds, probably intending to go to the kitchen that was behind the house. Our company would probably have paid no attention to this, if Madam Havelaar had not said that afternoon at dinner that Madam Slotering was so shy, and appeared to exercise a sort of control over every one that came into the grounds. We saw the man, who had been called by the policeman, go to her, and she questioned him, apparently much to his dissatisfaction. At least he retraced his steps, and was soon outside. “I am very sorry for that,” said Tine; “perhaps it was a man selling fowls, or vegetables; I have nothing yet in the house.”
“Then send some one after him,” replied Havelaar; “you know that native ladies like to exercise power. Her husband was formerly the first man in the place, and however small an Assistant Resident may be as an individual, he is in his own district a petty king: she is not yet accustomed to dethronement. We must not grudge this small, pleasure to the poor woman; act as if you did not perceive it.”
This was not difficult for Tine; she had no desire for power.
A digression is necessary here, and I even intend to digress about digressions. It is not easy for an author to sail exactly between the two rocks of the too much or too little, and this difficulty is enhanced if one describes situations that have to remove the reader to unknown countries. There exists too nice a connexion between the places and the events for us to be able to abstain entirely from describing the former; and to avoid the two rocks, already mentioned, becomes doubly difficult for him who has chosen the Indies for the scene of his narrative. For whereas the author who deals with European situations may suppose many affairs to be known, on the other hand he whose story refers to the Indies has continually to ask himself whether the non-Indian will rightly understand this or that. If the European reader thinks of Madam Slotering as lodging with the Havelaars, as would be the case in Europe, it must appear incomprehensible that she was not present with the company that took coffee in the fore-gallery. I have certainly already observed that she lived in a separate house; but to understand this aright, and also events to be described, it is indeed necessary to make you acquainted with Havelaar’s house and grounds. The accusation often made against the great artist who wrote Waverley, that he often abuses the patience of his readers by devoting too many pages to topography, seems to me to be unfounded, and I believe that in order to judge of the appropriateness of such descriptions, one has only to consider—Was this topography required exactly to convey the impression which the author wanted to communicate to you? If so, do not be offended because he expects you to take the trouble to read what he had taken the trouble to write. But, if it was not required, then throw the book aside; for the author who is empty-headed enough unnecessarily to give topography for ideas, will be very seldom worth reading, even when at last his topography is at an end. But the judgment of the reader about the necessity of a deviation is often false, because he cannot know before the catastrophe what is necessary, and what not, to the systematic development of the situation; and when after the catastrophe he reads the book again—of books which one reads but once I do not speak—and even then thinks that this or that digression could have been omitted without marring the impression of the whole, the question remains whether he would have had the same impression of the whole if the author had not conducted him thither in a more or less artificial manner, just by means of the digressions which seem to him to be superfluous.
Do you think that the death of Amy Robsart would have touched you, if you had been a stranger in the halls of Kenilworth? And do you think that there is no connexion—connexion through contrast—between the rich dress wherein the unworthy Leicester showed himself to her, and the blackness of his soul? Do you not understand that Leicester—every one knows this who is acquainted with him from other sources than the novel only—was infinitely worse than he was painted in Kenilworth? But the great novelist, who liked better to charm by an artistic arrangement of colours than by coarseness of colour, thought it beneath him to dip his brush in all the mud and all the blood that clung to the unworthy favourite of Elizabeth. He wished to point out only one spot in the mud-pool; but he knew how to present such spots vividly to the eye, by means of what he put in juxtaposition, in his immortal writings. He who thinks that all this juxtaposition may be rejected as superfluous, quite forgets that in so doing in order to bring about effects, one would be obliged to go over to the school which, since 1830, has flourished so long in France; though I must say to the honour of that country, that the authors who in this respect have offended the most against good taste have been valued most in foreign countries, and not in France itself. The authors,—I believe that this school is now no more,—thought it easy to dip their hands in pools of blood and throw it in great spots on the picture, in order to be able to see them from a distance. To be sure they are easier to paint, these rough lines of red and black, than the beautiful lines in the calyx of a lily. Therefore that school generally chose kings for the heroes of narratives by preference, from the time when the nations were still in their infancy. You see, the affliction of the king is represented on paper by cries of the people: his anger gives the author an opportunity to kill thousands on the field of battle: his errors give room to paint famine and plague—suchlike things give work to rough pencils. If you are not touched at the sight of the corpse that lies there, there is room in my narrative for another man, convulsed with pain, and still shrieking. Did you not weep for the mother, who sought in vain for her child?—Well, I will show you another mother, who sees the quartering of her child. Did you remain unmoved at the martyrdom of that man?—I increase the number a hundredfold by torturing ninety-nine at his side. Are you hardened enough not to shudder when seeing this soldier, who, in the besieged fortification, devours his left arm because of hunger. . . . ?—
Epicure! I propose you give order, “Right and left wheel, form circle, left files eat left arms of right files. . . march!”
Yes, in this manner, artificial horrors become folly. . . which en passant I would fain prove.
And yet we would be reduced to this if we condemned too soon an author who wished to prepare you for his catastrophe without having recourse to these screaming[2] colours. But the danger of the other extreme is still greater. You despise the efforts of coarse literature, which thinks it must take your feelings by storm with such rough weapons; but if the author falls into the other extreme, if he sins by too much deviation from the principal matter, by too much pencilling, then your anger is still greater, and quite right; for then he has bored you, and that is unpardonable.
If we walk together and you stray every moment from the road, and call me into the underwood only with the intention to prolong the walk, I think this disagreeable, and intend to walk alone for the future. But if you can show me there a plant which I did not know before, or in which I may see something that I overlooked, if you show me from time to time a flower, which I like to pluck and carry in my button-hole, then I forgive your deviation from the road; yes, I am grateful for it.
And even without flower or plant, when you call me aside to show me through the trees the path that we shall walk upon by and by, but which now is still far from us in the depth, and which winds itself as a scarcely perceptible line through the field there below, then likewise I do not take this deviation amiss. For when at last we have arrived thus far, I shall know how our road has woundthrough the mountain, how it is that the sun, that was a few minutes ago there, is now on our left; why that hill is now behind us, whose summit was just now before us. . . . then through that deviation you have made it easy for me to comprehend my walkand to comprehend is to enjoy.
Reader, I have often in my narrative left you on the broad way, though it has cost me much not to take you with me into the underwood. I was afraid that the walk would weary you, as I did not know if you would be pleased with the flowers and plants which I would show you; but as I believe that you will afterwards be pleased to have seen the path we shall walk upon presently, I am obliged to tell you something about Havelaar’s house.
You would be very wrong to form your ideas of a house in the Indies according to European notions, and to think of a heap of stones, small rooms piled upon large rooms, with the street before it, neighbours right and left, whose household gods lean against yours, and a little garden with three gooseberry-bushes behind. With a few exceptions, the houses in the Indies have but one storey. The European reader will think this very strange, for it is a peculiarity of civilisation, or what passes for it, to consider strange all that is natural. The Indian houses are quite different from ours, but they are not strange; our houses are strange. He who was the first to allow himself the luxury of not sleeping in the same room with his cows, put the second room of his house not upon, but next to the first, for to build them all on the ground is both more simple and more comfortable. Our high houses owe their origin to want of space: we seek high in the air what we miss on the ground; and so every maid-servant, who in the evening shuts the window of her bed-room under the eaves, is a protest against this crowding, even when she is thinking, what I can readily believe, of something else.
In those countries, also, where civilisation and overcrowding of the population have not yet pushed mankind high up, because of the pressure below, the houses are of one storey, and Havelaar’s did not belong to the few exceptions to this rule. On entering, . . . . but no, I will give a proof that I abandon all claims to the picturesque. “Given,” an oblong: divide it into twenty-one parts, three in breadth, seven in depth. You give each of these partitions a number, beginning with the upper corner on the left-hand side, from there to the right, so that four comes under one, and so on.
| 1 | 2 | 3 |
| 4 | 5 | 6 |
| 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 |
The first three numbers together form the fore-gallery, which is often open on three sides, and whose roof is supported in the front by pillars. From there, one enters by two folding doors, the inner gallery which is represented by the three following numbers. The partitions 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, and 18, are rooms, most of them being connected by doors with each other. The three last numbers form the open gallery behind, and what I have not mentioned is a sort of closed inner gallery or passage. I am very proud of this description.[3]
I do not know what expression is used in Holland to give the idea conveyed in the Indies by the word “estate.” “Estate” is there neither garden, nor park, nor field, nor wood, but either something, or that, or altogether, or none of these. It is the ‘ground’ that belongs to the house, in so far as it is not covered by the house; thus, in India, the expression, “garden and estate” would be a pleonasm. There are no houses, or very few, without such ground. Some estates contain wood, and garden, and field, and make you think of a park; others are flower-gardens; elsewhere, again, the whole estate is one large grass-field; and lastly, there are some very simple ones reduced to a macadamised square, which is perhaps less agreeable to the eye, but which promotes cleanliness in the houses, because many insects are harboured by grass or trees. Havelaar’s “estate” was very large; yes, however strange it may sound, it might be called on one side boundless, as it was bordered by a ravine that extended to the shores of the Tji-Udjung, the river that surrounded Rankas-Betong with one of its many windings. It would be difficult to say where the ground of the Assistant Resident’s house ended, and where the common commenced, as the great ebb-tides and floods of the Tji-Udjung, which at this time had drawn back its shores as far as the horizon, and which at another time filled the ravine up to very near Havelaar’s house, changed its limits every moment. This ravine had always been a thorn in the eye of Madam Slotering,—that was very clear. The vegetable growth, everywhere so rapid in India, was always particularly luxuriant, on account of the mud that was left behind, to such an extent that, though the rising and falling of the water happened with a force that rooted up and carried away the underwood, a little time was sufficient to cover the ground with a shagginess which rendered the clearing of the grounds, even near the house, very difficult. And this would have been no little grief even to one who was not a mother. For not to speak of all sorts of insects that generally flew during the evening round the lamp in such a multitude that to read and write became impossible, which is very tiresome in many parts of the Indies, there were a number of snakes and other animals in the underwood, not only in the ravine, but even found every moment in the garden, near and behind the house, or in the grass of the square in front.
Standing in the fore-gallery with the face to this square, one’s back was to the house; on the left was the building with the offices, the counting-house, and the place for meetings, where Havelaar had spoken that morning to the chiefs, and behind that was the ravine which extended to the Tji-Udjung. Exactly opposite the offices was the old mansion of the Assistant Residents, which was now temporarily inhabited by Madam Slotering; and as one could reach the estate by two ways that were approached on both sides by the grass-fields, of course every one who came on the estate to go to the kitchen or stalls that were behind the principal building, had either to pass the offices or Madam Slotering’s house. On one side of the principal building, and behind it, was the very large garden, which had excited the joy of Tine, because of the many flowers which she found there, and above all, because there little Max could so often play.
Havelaar had made his excuses to Madam Slotering for not having yet paid her a visit; he would go there next morning, but Tine had been there and made acquaintance with her. I have already said that this lady was a so-called “native,” who spoke no other language than Malay. She had intimated her desire to keep her own household, to which Tine readily agreed. And she did not comply for want of hospitality, but chiefly out of fear that she, just arrived at Lebak, could not receive Madam Slotering so well as she considered she ought under the peculiar circumstances in which she was placed. True, this lady, who understood no Dutch, need not have apprehended any harm from the narratives of Max, as Tine had said; but she understood that more was required than not to harm the Slotering family, and the scanty kitchen, in connexion with the intended economy, made her consider the intention of Madam Slotering very wise. It is also doubtful whether, had the circumstances been otherwise, the intercourse with a person who spoke only one language, wherein nothing is printed that civilizes the mind, would have conduced to mutual pleasure. Tine would have kept her company as much as possible, and would have spoken much with her about the “kitchen” and “puddings,” but this would always have been a sacrifice, and it was therefore thought much better that matters had been arranged through Madam Slotering’s voluntary retirement in such a manner as left every one in perfect liberty. Yet it was curious that this lady had not only refused to take part in social dinners, but that she even made no use of the offer to have her food prepared in the kitchen of Havelaar’s house, and this reserve went a little too far, as Tine said, for the kitchen was large enough.
- ↑ 1000 guilders = £83, 6s. 8d. The English reader will bear in mind that when ‘thousands’ are spoken of, guilders are referred to.
- ↑ This is a literal rendering of the word used by the author.
- ↑ Nos. 7 and 10, 10 and 13, 13 and 16, are connected by doors with each other; 9 and 12, 12 and 15, 15 and 18 are connected by doors with each other. Between 5 and 8 a door; between 17 and 20 a door; between 7 and 8, 10 and 11, 13 and 14, 16 and 17 doors; between 8 and 9, 11 and 12, 14 and 15, 17 and 18 doors.