“Where Allah sends inundations that wash away the fields; where He hardens the ground as barren stones; where He makes the sun burn even to scorching; where He sends war to devastate the fields; where He slays with diseases, that make the hands weak, or with dryness that kills the corn——there, chiefs of Lebak, we bend our heads, and say: ‘His will be done!’
“But it is not so in Bantam-Kidool.
“I have been sent here to be your friend, your elder brother. Should not you warn your younger brother, if you saw a tiger in his way?
“Chiefs of Lebak, we have often committed faults, and our country is poor, because we have committed so many faults.
“For in Tjikandi, Bolang, and Krawang, in the regions round about Batavia, there are many men who were born in our country, and who have left our country.
“Why do they seek labour far from the place where they buried their parents? Why have they fled from the village where they were circumcised? Why do they [[133]]prefer the coolness of the tree that grows there, to the shade of our woods?
“And even there to the North-West, over the sea, are many who ought to be our children, but who have left Lebak to wander in foreign countries with Kris,[7] and Klewang,[8] and gun! And there they die miserably; for the Government has power to beat the rebels.
“I ask you, chiefs of Lebak, why have many gone away, not to be buried where they were born? Why does the tree ask, ‘Where is the man whom I saw playing at my foot when a child?’ ”
Havelaar waited here for a moment. To understand in some degree the impression which his words made, one ought to have heard and seen him. When he spoke of his child, there was a softness in his voice, something that was extremely touching, and which allured you to ask, “Where is the little one? I will at once kiss the child, that made his father speak so;” but when he soon afterwards passed with little order to the questions why Lebak was poor, and why so many inhabitants of these regions removed to other places, there was in his tone something which made you think of the noise that a drill makes when forcibly turned in hard wood. Yet he did not speak [[134]]very loud, neither did he put any stress on certain words; there was even something monotonous in his voice, but whether studied or natural, which by this very monotony made the impression of his words stronger on minds that were so particularly sensitive to such a language. His metaphors, which he always borrowed from the life that surrounded him, were to him as allies to make what he meant perfectly understood, and not, as often happens, troublesome appendages, which burden the phrases of orators, without adding any plainness to the conception of what is meant to be illustrated. We are now-a-days accustomed to the absurdity of the expression “Strong as a lion;” but he who first used this metaphor in Europe, showed that he had not drawn the comparison from the poetry of the soul, which furnishes figures of speech, and cannot speak otherwise, but that he had simply copied this from some book,—from the Bible, perhaps,—in which a lion was mentioned. For none of his hearers ever tried the strength of the lion, and it would therefore have been rather necessary to make them estimate that strength, by comparing the lion to some other creature whose strength was known to them, than otherwise.
You see, that Havelaar was truly a poet, that he, speaking of the rice-fields, that were on the mountains, directed his eyes thither through the open side of the hall, and that he really stood there; and in the imagination of [[135]]Havelaar’s hearers he really looked about and asked for the inhabitants of Lebak that had gone. He invented nothing; he heard the tree speak, and only thought that he repeated what he imagined to have heard so distinctly in his poetical inspiration.