Max Havelaar (Siebenhaar)/Chapter 13
“And now may we hear why you really were suspended?” asked Duclari.
“Oh, yes, with pleasure! For as I can give all that I have to say about it as truth, and can partly prove it even now, you will see from it that I did not act with levity when in my story about that lost child I did not reject the tittle-tattle of Padang as absolutely absurd. You will find it perfectly credible, when you make acquaintance with our valiant General in the affairs that concern me.
“There were, as I said, in my cash-accounts at Natal inaccuracies and omissions. You know perfectly well how every inaccuracy is to one’s own disadvantage: one never has any money in excess through negligence. The Chief of the Accountant’s Branch at Padang, who was not exactly a particular friend of mine, maintained that there were thousands[1] short. But please note that my attention was not drawn to this while I was at Natal. Most unexpectedly I received a transfer to the Padang Uplands. You know, Verbrugge, that in Sumatra a position in the Uplands of Padang is considered more advantageous and pleasant than in the Northern Residency. As I had, only a few months earlier, had a visit from the Governor (you will hear presently the why and how), and as during his stay in Natal, and even in my house, things had happened in which I had acted in what seemed to me a proper and manly manner, I took this transfer as a favourable distinction, and left Natal for Padang with a light heart. I travelled in a French boat, the Baobab, from Marseilles, which had loaded pepper in Atchin, and which . . . of course, at Natal ‘was short of drinking-water.” As soon as I arrived at Padang, with the intention of at once leaving thence for the Interior, I wished, in accordance with custom and duty, to call on the Governor; but he sent me word that he could not see me, and at the same time that I was to defer my departure for my new station till further orders. You will understand that I was greatly astonished at this, the more so as at Natal he had on leaving me given me the impression that he had rather a good opinion of me. I had not many acquaintances at Padang, but from the few I had I learnt—or rather I inferred it from their attitude—that the General was greatly vexed with me. I say I inferred it, for, at an outpost such as Padang was at that time, the good-will of many might be taken as a barometer of the favour one had found in the eyes of the Governor. I felt that a storm was brewing, without knowing from what quarter the wind was to come. As I was in need of money, I asked this one and the other successively to assist me, and I was really amazed to meet with a refusal everywhere. At Padang no less than elsewhere in India, where in general credit plays even too great a part, the attitude on that score was usually rather liberal. In every other case they would gladly have advanced a few hundred guilders to a travelling Controller who was delayed somewhere unexpectedly. But to me all help was refused. I pressed some of those I spoke to that they should name the causes of this suspicious demeanour, and de fil en aiguille I finally came to know that in my financial management at Natal errors and omissions had been discovered which laid me under suspicion of unfaithful administration. That there were errors in my administration did not astonish me in the least. Had it been otherwise it would have given me cause for astonishment; but I certainly thought it extraordinary that the Governor, who had been a personal witness to the fact that I had constantly had to fight far from my office with the discontent of the population and their incessant attempts at rebellion . . . that he who himself had praised me for what he had called ‘resoluteness,’ now labelled the discovered error with the name of disloyalty or dishonesty. For surely no one could know better than he that in such cases there never could be question of anything else than force majeure.
“And even if anyone were to deny this force majeure, if anyone wished to hold me responsible for errors that occurred in moments when—often in danger of life!—far from the cashbox or what did duty as such, I had to entrust its care to others, as though one demanded that, doing one thing, I still had no business to leave the other undone, even then I could only have been guilty of a carelessness which had nothing in common with ‘disloyalty.’ There were, moreover, especially in those days, numerous instances where the Government had fully recognized this difficulty of the position of the officials in Sumatra, and it seemed to be quite an accepted principle that on such occasions one overlooked a reasonable amount of things. One confined oneself to deducting the equivalent of the shortage from the officer’s salary, and the proof would have had to be very clear before anyone would have mentioned the word ‘disloyalty’ or even thought of it. And this had been so entirely the rule that at Natal I had myself said to the Governor that I feared, when my accounts were examined in the office at Padang, I should have to refund a good deal, to which he replied with a shrug of the shoulders: ‘Ah, well . . . those money matters!’ as though he himself felt that the lesser concern had to stand back for the greater.
“Now I recognize that money matters are important. But however important, in this case they were subordinate to other branches of activity that pre-eminently required attention. If owing to carelessness or neglect a few thousand guilders had been short in my administration, I should not have called this in itself a trifle. But as these thousands were short in consequence of my successful efforts to prevent the rebellion which threatened to set the division of Mandhéling aflame, and to allow the Atchinese to return to the places whence just recently we had expelled them at the sacrifice of much money and many lives, the importance of the shortage sank into insignificance, and it was even more or less unjust to require its repayment from one who had saved infinitely greater interests.
“And yet I was content with such repayment. For by not exacting it the door would have been opened wide to dishonesty.
“After waiting for days—you will understand in what state of mind!—I received from the Governor’s secretariate a letter in which he notified me that I was suspected of disloyalty, and should have to answer a number of charges with regard to my administration. Some of them I could at once clear up. For others, however, I required to examine certain documents, and it was of special importance that I should look into these matters at Natal itself, in order to inquire among my clerks into the causes of the discrepancies found, as probably there I should have succeeded in my efforts to clear up everything. For instance, the neglect to write off moneys sent to Mandhéling—you know, Verbrugge, that troops in the interior are paid from the Natal treasury supplies—or other similar things, which most probably would at once have been discovered by me if I could have looked into them on the spot, might very likely have caused these regrettable errors. But the General would not let me go to Natal. This refusal made me all the more impressed with the strange manner in which this charge of disloyalty had been laid against me. Why had I been so suddenly transferred from Natal, and that under suspicion of disloyalty? Why had this degrading suspicion only been made known to me when I was far from the place where I should have been in a position to defend myself? And above all, why had these matters in my case immediately been placed in the most unfavourable light, contrary to justice and accepted custom?
“Before I was even able to reply to all the strictures as best I could without archives or oral inquiry, I learnt from an indirect source that the General was so angry with me ‘because at Natal I had crossed him, in which indeed, people added, I had been very wrong.’
“Then a light dawned on me. Yes, I had crossed him, but all the time naïvely supposing that he would esteem me for it! I had crossed him, but on his departure nothing had made me suspect that he was angry about it! Stupidly enough I had looked upon the favourable transfer to Padang as a proof that he had admired me for ‘crossing’ him. You will see how little I knew him.
“But as soon as I learnt that this was the cause of the severity with which my financial administration had been condemned, I was at peace with myself. I answered point by point to the best of my ability, and concluded my letter—I still have the notes of it—with the words:
“ ‘I have answered the strictures passed on my administration as far as it is possible without archives or local inquiry. I beg that Your Excellency will refrain from treating me with any indulgence. I am young, and insignificant in comparison with the power of the ruling conceptions against which my principles compel me to stand up; but I am nevertheless proud of my moral independence, proud of my honour.’
“Next day I was suspended on account of ‘unfaithful administration.” The Officer of Justice was ordered to carry out his ‘office and duty’ with regard to me.
“So there I stood at Padang, scarce twenty-three, and looked into the future which was to bring me dishonour! I was advised to appeal on the score of my youth—I was still a minor[2] when the alleged offences had taken place—but I declined. Had I not already thought and suffered too much, and . . . I venture to add: also already worked too much, for me to wish to take shelter behind my youth? You see from the conclusion of my letter just quoted, that I did not wish to be treated as a child, I who at Natal had done my duty in respect to the General like a man. And also, from that letter you may see how unfounded was the charge laid against me. Surely, one who is guilty of petty offences does not write like that!
“I was not imprisoned, yet this should have been done if they had been in earnest with their criminal suspicion. Perhaps, however, there was a reason for this apparent omission. For isn’t one compelled to keep and feed a prisoner? As I was not allowed to leave Padang, I was in reality a prisoner all the same, but a prisoner without a roof and without bread. I had repeatedly, but every time without result, written to the General to say that he was not at liberty to prevent my departure from Padang, for that, even if I were guilty of the worst crime, no offence may be punished with starvation.
“After the Council of Justice, being evidently at a loss how to act in the matter, had found a way out by declaring itself incompetent, because prosecution for offences in office may only take place on the authorization of the Government in Batavia, the General detained me, as I said, nine months at Padang. At last he received orders from headquarters to allow me to go to Batavia.
“When, a couple of years after, I had a little money—my dear Tine, you had given it me!—I paid a few thousand guilders in order to settle the Natal cash-accounts of 1842 and 1843, and someone who might be considered to represent the Government of Netherlands India said to me: ‘I shouldn’t have done this in your place . . . I should have given them a bill on eternity.’ Ainsi va le monde!”
Just as Havelaar wanted to start the story his guests expected from him, and which was to make it clear why and in what manner he had so ‘crossed’ General Vandamme at Natal, Mrs. Slotering showed herself in the front veranda of her house, and beckoned the police-orderly who was sitting on a bench at one side of Havelaar’s residence. He went over to her, and then called out something to a man who had just entered her grounds, probably in order to go to the kitchen at the back of the house. Our company would probably not have paid attention to this, if Tine had not said at table during the afternoon that Mrs. Slotering was so timid and seemed to exercise a kind of supervision over everyone who entered the grounds. One could see the man whom the orderly had called go towards her, and it almost seemed as if she were questioning him, and as if the result were not to his advantage. He, at any rate, retraced his steps and went outside.
“I am sorry,” said Tine. “It may have been a man who had fowls for sale, or vegetables. I haven’t anything in the house yet.”
“Well, then you can send out someone,” replied Havelaar. “You know that native ladies are fond of exercising authority. Her husband was formerly the principal person here, and however little an Assistant-Resident may in reality count, in his Division he is a little king: she isn’t accustomed yet to her dethronement. Don’t let us rob the poor woman of this little pleasure. Pretend not to notice it.”
This, certainly, Tine did not find difficult: she was not fond of authority.
Here it is necessary to make a digression, and I even want to digress this time about digressions. It is not always easy for a writer to sail carefully through the passage between the two rocks of too much or too little, and this difficulty increases when one describes conditions that take the reader to unknown regions. There is too close a relation between places and events to allow of the entire omission of place-description, and the difficulty of avoiding both rocks referred to is twice as great for anyone who has selected India as the scene of his story. For whereas a writer who deals with European conditions can take many things as known, he that places his drama in India must constantly ask himself whether the non-Indian reader will correctly understand this or that circumstance. If the European reader should imagine Mrs. Slotering as “staying” with the Havelaars, as might be the case in Europe, he would think it incomprehensible that she was not present in the company which was taking coffee in the front veranda. It is true, I have already said that she lived in a separate house, but for the right conception of this, and also of subsequent events, it is really necessary that I make known, more or less, the nature of Havelaar’s house and grounds.
The charge so frequently laid against the great master who wrote Waverley, that he often abused the patience of his readers in devoting too many pages to place-description, seems to me unfounded, and I hold that in judging of the correctness of such stricture, one must simply ask oneself the question: Was this description necessary to the right understanding of the impression the author wished to communicate to you? If so, then he should not be blamed for expecting you to take the trouble of reading what he has taken the trouble to write. If not, then one may throw the book away. For the author who is empty-headed enough to give, without necessity, topography for ideas, is rarely worth the trouble of reading, even where at last his description of places ends. But one must not forget that often the opinion of the reader as regards the necessity or otherwise of a digression is false, because before the catastrophe he cannot know what is or is not requisite for a gradual unfolding of the circumstances. And if after the catastrophe he takes up the book again—I am not speaking of books that one only reads once—and even then still holds that this or that digression could have been spared without detriment to the impression of the whole, it still always remains the question whether he would have received entirely that same impression if the author had not led him to it in a more or less artistic manner, exactly by those digressions which to the superficially judging reader appear superfluous.
Do you think that Amy Robsart’s death would have moved you so much if you had been a stranger in Kenilworth halls? and can you believe that there is no connection—the connection of contrast—between the rich attire in which the unworthy Leicester showed himself to her, and the blackness of his soul? Do you not feel that Leicester—everyone knows this who knows the man from other sources than the novel alone—stood infinitely lower than he is depicted in Kenilworth? But the great novelist, who would rather fascinate by artistic arrangement of shading than by coarseness of colours, judged it beneath him to steep his brush in all the mud and blood that clung to the unworthy favourite of Elizabeth. He wished to point to but one speck in the pool of filth, but understood the art of making such specks conspicuous by means of the tints he placed by their side in his immortal writings. Anyone now who thinks he can cast away as superfluous what has thus been placed alongside it, loses sight completely of the fact that then, in order to produce effects, one will have to go back to the School which from 1830 flourished so long in France, although to the credit of that country I must say that the authors who sinned most against good taste in this respect were more in vogue in other countries than in France herself. That School—I trust and believe it is now extinct—appreciated how easy it was to grope in pools of blood, and cast handfuls of it on the canvas, so that one might see the large blotches at a distance! And it is true, the coarse streaks of red and black are painted with less exertion than is required to pencil in the delicate touches in the cup of a lily. For that very reason this school mostly selected kings as heroes for its stories, and for preference those belonging to the time when the nations had not yet come of age. See, the sorrow of the king is translated on paper into the howl of the people . . . his wrath offers the author an opportunity to kill thousands in the field of battle . . . his mistakes give room for the painting of famine and pestilence . . . all this gives scope for the coarse brush! If you are not moved by the mute horror of a corpse I have just stretched out there, then there is room in my story for a victim that still gasps and shrieks! Have you not shed tears for that mother who vainly seeks her child? . . . well, I will show you another mother who sees her child quartered! Are your feelings not harrowed by the martyrdom of that man? . . . I will multiply the sensation a hundredfold by having ninety-nine other men tortured by the side of him! Are you so hardened as not to shudder at the sight of the soldier who, in the beleaguered fortress, from hunger devours his left arm? . . .
Epicure! I propose that you shall command: “Form a circle to the right and left! And let every man eat the left arm of the man on his right . . . quick march!”
Yes, well, in this way artistic horror passes on to silliness . . . which is what en passant I wished to prove.
And to this indeed one would come by condemning prematurely an author who wished to prepare you gradually for his catastrophe, without having recourse to these shrieking colours.
Yet the danger on the opposite side is even greater. You despise the efforts of a coarse literature which holds that it must storm your feelings with gross weapons, but . . . if the author goes to the other extreme, if he offends by too much digression from his main theme, by too much brush-mannerism, then your anger is greater still, and rightly so! For then he bores you, and this is unpardonable.
When you and I are walking together, and you keep straying from the road and calling me into the thicket, with the sole object of lengthening our walk, I naturally think this disagreeable, and make up my mind that next time I will go by myself. But if you are able to show me a plant in the thicket which I did not know before, or about which you point out to me something that had hitherto escaped my notice . . . if from time to time you take me to a flower which I am tempted to pick and wear in my buttonhole, then I forgive you these digressions from the road; indeed, they fill me with gratitude.
And even without flower or plant, as soon as you call me aside to show me through an opening in the trees the path that presently we shall be treading, but that still lies in front of us in the depth of distance, and winds down below like a scarce perceptible line through the field yonder . . . then also I do not take your digression amiss. For when at last we shall have gone so far, I shall then know how our road has meandered through the mountains, what it is that has caused the sun, just now yonder, to have since come round to the left of us, why that hill is now behind us whose top we previously saw in front of us . . . see, then your digression has made it possible for me to understand the nature of my walk, and understanding is joy.
I, reader, have in my story often left you on the main road, although I was sorely tempted to carry you off into the thicket. I feared that the walk might bore you, as I did not know whether you would derive any pleasure from the flowers or plants I wished to show you. But as this time I believe that afterwards it will give you satisfaction to have seen the path that presently we shall tread, I now feel urged to tell you something about Havelaar’s house.
One would be mistaken if one formed a conception of a house in Java according to European ideas, and imagined a mass of stone with rooms large and small heaped on top of one another, with the street in front, neighbours to the right and left whose lares and penates lean up against our own, and a puny garden behind with three little currant trees. With but few exceptions, the houses in India have no storeys. This may appear strange to the European reader, for it is characteristic of civilization—or what passes as such—to think everything strange that is natural. The Indian houses are entirely different from ours, but it is not they that are strange, it is ours. He that first was able to permit himself the luxury of not sleeping in one room with his cows did not place the second room of his house on top, but by the side of the first, for building on one floor is more simple and also offers more comfort to the occupant. Our high houses were born from the want of space: we sought in the air what could not be found on the earth, and so in reality every servant-girl who of an evening shuts the window of the attic she sleeps in is a living protest against over-population . . . though she herself thinks of something else, I am quite willing to believe.
In countries, therefore, where civilization and over-population have not yet, by compression below, pinched humanity upward, the houses are without storeys, and Havelaar’s did not belong to the rare exceptions to this rule. On entering . . . but no, I will give proof that I relinquish every claim to picturesqueness. Given: an oblong rectangular area which you are asked to divide into twenty-one spaces, three extending from side to side, seven from front to back. We will number these spaces, beginning at the left-top corner, towards the right, so that number 4 comes under number 1, 5 under 2, and so on.
The first three numbers together form the front veranda, which is open on three sides, and the front part of the roof of which rests on columns. Thence through the double doors one enters the inner colonnade, represented by the next three spaces. Numbers 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15, 16 and 18 are rooms, most of which are connected with the adjoining ones by doors. The highest three numbers form the open rear-gallery, and the part I omitted is a kind of enclosed inner gallery, or passage. I am quite proud of this description.
It is difficult to say what expression would in Holland convey the idea attached in India to the word “grounds.” Here there is neither garden, nor park, nor field, nor wood, but either something of each, or all together, or nothing of any. It is the land which belongs to the house, in so far as it is not covered by the house, so that in India the expression “house and grounds” would be considered redundant. There are here few or no houses without such grounds. Some contain woods and gardens and meadowland, and suggest a park. Others are flower-gardens. Elsewhere again the whole grounds are one large grass-paddock. And finally there are some which, quite simply, are made entirely into one macadamized square, perhaps less attractive to the eye, but a great auxiliary to cleanliness in the houses, as many kinds of insects are attracted by grass and trees.
Now Havelaar’s grounds were large, and—it may sound strange—on one side one might have called them unlimited, as they bordered on a ravine which extended to the banks of the Tjioodyoong, the river which encloses Rangkas-Betoong in one of its many windings. It was difficult to define where the grounds of the assistant-residency terminated, and where communal lands started, as the great fall of water in the Tjioodyoong, which now retired its banks as far as the eye could see, and then again filled the ravine very close to Havelaar’s house, continually altered the boundaries.
This ravine had always been a thorn in the flesh of Mrs. Slotering, as was very natural. The vegetation, already everywhere in India so rapid in its growth, was, owing to the incessant accretion of river-ooze, most luxuriant; so much so that, even if the advancing and retiring waters had moved with a violence that uprooted and carried off the brushwood, yet there would have been but very little time required to cover the ground again with all the scrubby plant-life which rendered the cleaning up of the grounds, even in the immediate vicinity of the house, so difficult. And this caused no end of annoyance, even to others than the mother of the family. For without speaking of all sorts of insects, which usually of an evening flew round the lamp in such numbers as to make reading and writing an impossibility (a trouble known in many places in India), there were also in this brushwood a number of snakes and other animals, which did not confine themselves to the ravine, but were over and over again also found in the garden and behind the house, or on the grass-plot in the front square.
This square confronted one when standing in the outer veranda with one’s back to the house. To the left of it was the building with the offices, the Treasury and the meeting-room where in the morning Havelaar had addressed the Chiefs, and behind it extended the ravine, which one overlooked as far as the Tjioodyoong. Exactly opposite the offices stood the old assistant-residency, now temporarily occupied by Mrs. Slotering; and as the access from the main road to the grounds lay along two roads that passed by the two sides of the grass-plot, it follows that anyone entering the grounds to go to the kitchen or stables behind the chief building had to pass either the offices or Mrs. Slotering’s house. Alongside and behind the chief building lay the large garden which had appealed to Tine on account of the many flowers she found there, and especially because little Max would often play there.
Havelaar had sent his excuses to Mrs. Slotering for not having called on her yet. He proposed to go the next day, but Tine had already been, and made acquaintance. We have already heard that the lady was a so-called “native child,” who spoke no other language than Malay. She had intimated her wish to continue her own household, to which Tine agreed with pleasure. And this agreement did not spring from want of hospitality, but chiefly from the fear that, having only just arrived at Lebak, and therefore not yet being “straight,” she would not be able to make Mrs. Slotering as comfortable as the special circumstances of that lady made desirable. True, as she did not speak Dutch, she would not be “harmed” by the stories of Max, as Tine had called it; but the latter realized that more was necessary than not to harm the Slotering family, and the ill-furnished kitchen, in connection with the proposed economy, made her really consider Mrs. Slotering’s desire very sensible. Whether, for the remainder, had the circumstances been different, the conversation with a person who spoke only one language, in which nothing has been printed that refines the mind, would have been conducive to mutual enjoyment, is doubtful. Tine would of course have associated with her as much as possible, and spoken to her a good deal about kitchen affairs, about sambal-sambal,[3] about pickling ketimon—without Liebig, ye gods!—but that kind of thing must in any case be a sacrifice, and it was therefore entirely satisfactory that owing to Mrs. Slotering’s voluntary seclusion things had been settled in a manner which left both parties perfectly free. Still, it was peculiar that this lady had not only declined to take part in the common meals, but that she would not even make use of the offer to have her food prepared in the kitchen of Havelaar’s house. This modesty, Tine said, was carried a little far, for there was room enough in the kitchen.