Hoofdstuk 9

NINTH CHAPTER. I would give a great deal, reader, to know with precision just how long I could keep a heroine hovering in the air before you, at the description of a castle, laid my book down in despair without waiting for the creature to reach the ground?

If I ever needed such a leap in my story, I would, out of caution, still always choose a first floor as the starting point of her jump, and a castle about which there was little to say.

But set your mind at ease for now: Havelaar's house had no upper floor, and the heroine of my book—good heavens, the dear, faithful, anspruchlose Tine, a heroine!—never once jumped out of a window.

When I closed the previous chapter with a hint of some variety in the next, this was really more an oratorical trick, a way of making an ending that "snapped" shut nicely, than because I genuinely believed the next chapter would have value only "for the sake of variety."

A writer is as vain as ... a man.

Speak ill of his mother or of the color of his hair, tell him he has an Amsterdam accent—which no Amsterdammer ever admits—and perhaps he will forgive you these things. But ... never lay a finger on the outermost edge of the smallest detail of some side matter that lay next to his writing ... for that he will not forgive you!

So if you do not find my book beautiful, and you should happen to meet me, behave as though we did not know each other.

No, even such a chapter "for the sake of variety" appears to me, through the magnifying glass of my writerly vanity, supremely important and even indispensable; and if you skipped it, and afterward were not duly taken with my book, I would not hesitate to blame that skipping as the reason you could not judge my book, for you had failed to read precisely the essential part. Thus would I—being a man and a writer—hold every chapter to be essential that you had passed over with unforgivable readerly frivolity.

I imagine your wife asking: "Is there much to that book?" And you say, for instance—horribile auditu to me—with the verbosity that comes naturally to married men:

—Hm ... well ... I don't know yet.

Well then, barbarian, read on! The important part is right at the door.

And with a trembling lip I stare at you, and measure the thickness of the turned pages, and I search your face for some reflection of the chapter "that is so beautiful" ... No, I say, he is not there yet.

In a moment he will leap up, embrace something in his rapture, his wife perhaps. But you read on.

The "beautiful chapter" must be past by now, it seems to me. You have not sprung up in the least, you have embraced nothing.

And ever thinner grows the wad of pages under your right thumb, and ever leaner grows my hope for that embrace ... yes, truly, I had even counted on a tear!

And you have read the novel through to where "they get each other," and you say—another form of eloquence in the married state—with a yawn:

—Well ... well! It is a book that ... hm!

Ah, they write so much these days! But do you not know then, you brute, you tiger, you European, you reader, do you not know that you have just spent an hour there gnawing at my mind as at a toothpick?

Chewing and crunching on the flesh and bone of your own kind?

Cannibal, my soul was lodged in there, my soul that you have ground up like once-eaten grass! It was my heart that you gulped down there like a little treat! For into that book I had laid that heart and that soul, and so many tears fell on that manuscript, and my blood drained from my veins as I wrote on, and I gave you all of it, and that you bought for a few pennies ... and you say: hm!

The reader understands that I am not speaking here of my own book.

So that all I mean to say, to put it with Abraham Blankaart ...

—Who is that, Abraham Blankaart? asked Louise Rosemeyer, and Frits told her, which gave me great pleasure, for it gave me the chance to get up for once and, for that evening at least, to bring the reading to an end.

You know that I am a broker in coffee—Lauriergracht No. 37—and that I will do anything for my trade.

Anyone, then, will be able to gather how little satisfied I was with Stern's work.

I had hoped for coffee, and he gave us ... well, heaven knows what!

With his essay he has already kept us busy for three reading-circle evenings, and, what is worst of all, the Rosemeyers find it beautiful.

So they say, at least.

Whenever I raise an objection, he appeals to Louise. "Her approval," he says, "weighs more with him than all the coffee in the world," and besides: "when my heart glows ..." etc.—See this tirade on page so-and-so, or rather, do not see it.—And there I stand, not knowing what to do!

That parcel of Sjaalman's is a veritable Trojan horse.

Frits, too, is being spoiled by it.

He has, so far as I can tell, helped Stern, for that Abraham Blankaart is far too Dutch for a German.

Both of them are so pedantic that I am genuinely at a loss with the whole business.

The worst of it is that I have entered into an agreement with Gaafzuiger for the publication of a book that is supposed to deal with the coffee auctions—all the Netherlands is waiting for it—and now this Stern goes off with me down quite another road! Yesterday he said: "set your mind at ease, all roads lead to Rome.

Just wait for the end of the introduction"—is all of this still only introduction—"I promise you"—he actually said "I mispromise you"—"that in the end the matter will come down to coffee, coffee, to nothing but coffee!

Think of Horace," he went on, "did he not already say: omne tulit punctum, qui miscuit ... coffee with something else? Do you not do exactly the same yourself when you put sugar and milk in your cup?"

And then I have to keep silent.

Not because he is right, but because I am bound, on behalf of the firm of Last & Co, to see to it that old Stern does not slip away to Busselinck & Waterman, who would serve him badly because they are bunglers. To you, reader, I pour out my heart, and so that you, after reading Stern's writing—have you really read it?—should not pour out your wrath upon an innocent head, for I ask you, who will employ a broker who calls him a cannibal?—I am anxious that you should be convinced of my innocence.

I cannot, after all, push this Stern out of the firm of my book, now that things have once gone so far that Louise Rosemeyer, when she comes out of church—the boys seem to wait for her—asks whether he will come a little early that evening, to read out plenty of Max and Tine?

But because you bought or borrowed the book trusting in the dignified title that promises something solid, I acknowledge your claim to something good for your money, and that is why I myself am once again writing a couple of chapters.

You are not in the Rosemeyers' reading circle, reader, and therefore happier than I, who must listen to it all.

You are free to skip the chapters that reek of German exaltation, and to occupy yourself only with what is written by me, who am a respectable man, and a broker in coffee.