Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/137

 you had not read. In this way I should—for I am a man and a writer—consider as every chapter you had skipped with unpardonable reader-levity.

I picture to myself how your wife asks: “Is there anything that book?” And you answer, for instance—horribile auditu for me—with the wealth of words characteristic of married men:

“Hm well  I don’t know yet.”

Why, then, barbarian, read on. The all-important thing is just at your gate. And I gaze at you with trembling lips, and measure the thickness of leaves turned over, and on your face I search for the reflection of the chapter that is so beautiful

“No,” I say, “he has not got to it yet. Presently he will jump up, in ecstasy he will embrace something, perhaps his wife ”

But you read on. The “beautiful chapter” must be passed, I think. You have not jumped up at all, you have not embraced

And ever thinner grows the volume of leaves under your right thumb, and ever more meagre grows my hope of that embrace yes, faith! I had even made sure of a tear!

And you have read the novel through to “where they get each other,” and you say yawning—again a form of eloquence in the state of wedlock:

“Why well! It’s a book that hm! Well, they write such a lot nowadays!”

But know you not then, monster, tiger, reader, know you not then that you have just whiled away an hour chewing my spirit like a toothpick? Gnawing and biting flesh and bone of your own kindred? Cannibal, in it was my soul, my soul that you have chewed for the second time as a cow chews grass! It is my heart you have just swallowed as a delicacy! For in that book I had put both this heart and soul, and so many tears fell on the manuscript, and my blood oozed from my veins as I wrote on, and I gave you all this, and you bought it for a few pence and you say: “hm!”