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
