Hoofdstuk 1

It is not my habit to write novels, or things of that sort, and so it was a long while before I brought myself to order a couple of extra reams of paper and begin the work that you, dear reader, have just taken into your hands, and that you must read whether you are a coffee broker or whether you are something else.

Not only have I never written anything resembling a novel, but I do not even care to read such a thing, because I am a man of business.

For years I have asked myself what such things are good for, and I stand amazed at the impudence with which a poet or a teller of novels dares to pin upon you something that never happened, and for the most part cannot happen.

If in my line of work—I am a coffee broker, and I live on the Lauriergracht, No. 37—I were to hand a principal—a principal is someone who sells coffee—a statement in which there appeared only a small fraction of the untruths that make up the main substance of poems and novels, he would take his business to Busselinck & Waterman at once. They too are coffee brokers, but their address you need not know.

So I take good care to write no novels, nor to make any other false statements.

I have, moreover, always observed that people who meddle with that sort of thing usually come off badly.

I am forty-three years old, I have attended the exchange for twenty years, and so I can step forward when one calls for someone with experience.

I have seen many a house fall!

And usually, when I traced the causes, it seemed to me that they had to be sought in the wrong direction given to most people in their youth.

I say: truth and common sense, and here I stand fast. For Scripture I make an exception, of course.

The mischief begins right back with Van Alphen, and indeed in his very first line about those "dear little ones." What the deuce could move that old gentleman to give himself out as an admirer of my little sister Truitje, who had sore eyes, or of my brother Gerrit, who was forever picking his nose? And yet he says "that he sang those little verses, driven by love." As a child I often thought: man, I should dearly like to meet you once, and if you refused me the marbles I would ask of you, or my name spelled out in full in confectionery—I am called Batavus—then I should hold you for a liar.

But I never did set eyes on Van Alphen.

He was already dead, I believe, by the time he told us that my father was my best friend—I was fonder of Pauweltje Winser, who lived next to us on the Batavierstraat—and that my little dog was so grateful. We kept no dogs, because they are so unclean.

All lies! And so a child's upbringing goes on.

The new little sister came from the greengrocer-woman in a big cabbage. All Hollanders are brave and high-minded.

The Romans were glad that the Batavians let them live. The Bey of Tunis took a colic whenever he heard the Dutch flag flapping.

The Duke of Alva was a monster.

The ebb tide, in 1672 I believe, lasted somewhat longer than usual, expressly to protect the Netherlands. Lies!

The Netherlands has remained the Netherlands because our old folk tended their affairs well, and because they held the true faith. That is the heart of it!

And then later still other lies come along. A girl is an angel.

Whoever discovered this first never had any sisters. Love is a bliss.

One flees with some object or other to the end of the earth. The earth has no ends, and that love is nonsense too.

No one can say that I do not live well with my wife—she is a daughter of Last & Co, coffee brokers—no one can find any fault with our marriage.

I am a member of Artis, she has a shawl-length that cost ninety-two guilders, and of any such foolish love that absolutely insists on living at the end of the earth there has never yet been talk between us.

When we were married we made a little excursion to The Hague—she bought flannel there, of which I still wear undervests—and beyond that, love has never chased us out into the world. So: all nonsense and lies!

And would my marriage now be any less happy than that of the people who, out of love, brought consumption upon their necks, or tore the hair from their heads? Or do you suppose my household is the least bit less well ordered than it would be had I, seventeen years ago, told my girl in verse that I wished to marry her?

Nonsense! I could have done it just as well as anyone else, for making verses is a trade, surely less difficult than turning ivory.

How else would the motto-sweets with their little verses be so cheap?—Frits says "Uhlefeldjes"; I do not know why.

—And just ask the price of a set of billiard balls! I have nothing against verses in themselves.

If a man wants to set the words in rank and file, well and good!

But say nothing that is not true. "The air is raw, and it is four o'clock." That I will let pass, if it really is raw and four o'clock.

But if it is a quarter to three, then I, who do not set my words in rank and file, can say: "the air is raw, and it is a quarter to three." The verse-maker, on account of the rawness of his first line, is bound to a full hour. For him it must be exactly one, two o'clock, and so on, or else the air may not be raw.

Seven and nine are forbidden by the meter. So there he goes, off to his bungling!

Either the weather must be altered, or the time. One of the two is then a falsehood.

And it is not only those verses that lure the young into untruth. Just go to the theater once, and listen there to the lies that are foisted on a man.

The hero of the play is pulled out of the water by someone on the very brink of bankruptcy. Then he gives him half his fortune.

That cannot be true. When my hat blew into the water on the Prinsengracht the other day—Frits says: was blown—I gave the man who brought it back to me a dime; and he was content.

I know well that I should have had to give something more had he hauled me out myself, but certainly not half my fortune. It is plain enough that at that rate a man need only fall into the water twice to be dirt-poor.

What is worst about such spectacles on the stage is that the public grows so accustomed to all those untruths that it finds them fine and applauds them.

I have sometimes had a mind to throw a whole pit of them into the water, just to see who had meant that applause in earnest.

I, who love the truth, give everyone fair warning that I will not pay so high a salvage fee for the fishing-out of my person.

Whoever is not content with less may leave me lying there.

Only on Sundays would I give a little more, because then I wear my filigree chain and a different coat.

Yes, that stage corrupts many, more even than the novels do. It is so vivid to the eye!

With a bit of tinsel and a bit of cut-out paper lace, the whole thing looks so alluring. For children, I mean, and for people who are not in business.

Even when those theater folk want to portray poverty, their portrayal is always a lie.

A girl whose father has gone bankrupt works to support the family.