“AND HE WAS QUITE SATISFIED.”
Then her first lover—he was formerly a clerk at the copying-book, but now a millionaire—suddenly comes back and marries her. Lies again. A man with money will never marry a girl from a house that has failed.... And then—virtue rewarded! I have had plenty of experience in my time; but still it shocks me terribly when I see truth perverted in this way. Virtue rewarded! Isn’t it just like making a traffic out of virtue? It is not so in this world, and a very good thing it is that it is not. Where is the merit of being virtuous, if virtue is to be rewarded? Now, I am as virtuous as most people, but do I expect to be rewarded for it? If my business goes on well,—which, in fact, it does;—if my wife and children keep in health, so that I have no worry with the doctor and chemist;—if, year by year, I can put away a little sum for my old age ...;—if Fritz grows up a good man of business, so that he can step into my shoes when I retire and go to live at Driebergen, ...—well, if all these things are so, I am quite content. But all that is a natural result of circumstances, and of my attention to business. I don’t ask for any special reward for my virtue.
That I am virtuous, is quite evident from my love for truth. This—next to my attachment to our orthodox belief—is my ruling passion. And I should like the reader to be quite convinced of this, because it is my excuse for writing this book.
A second passion, which rules me quite as much, is my devotion to my business. And it is these two which have caused me to write this book. I am now going to explain how this happened.
Multatuli.
(From “Max Havelaar.”)
DROOGSTOPPEL PAYS A CHARITABLE VISIT.
Droogstoppel had undertaken to publish a volume selected from the MSS. of his old schoolfellow Havelaar—alias “Sjaalman,”—who had returned from the Indies in great poverty. He was preparing it for the press with the help of his son Fritz and his German clerk Stern. He soon found that the work involved difficulties.
Besides the difficulty of selecting and arranging what was necessary out of such a mass of materials, there were constantly occurring in the MSS. words and expressions which Stern could not understand, and which were new even to me. They were mostly Javanese or Malay. Moreover, many abbreviations were used, which were difficult to decipher. I saw that we needed Sjaalman, and as I do not think it good for a young man to pick up undesirable acquaintances, I was unwilling to send either Stern or Fritz. I took with me some sweets that had remained over from our last party,—for I am always one to think of things like that,—and I set out to look for his abode. It was not a very brilliant one,—but there is no such thing as equality among people, so how can they all expect to live in the same sort of houses? He says something of the same kind himself in his essay on “Claims to Happiness.” Besides, I don’t think anything of people who are always discontented.