Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/169

 ing things! Did you ever read his ‘Sale in a death-house’! and his ‘Graves’! and, above all: ‘Pedatti’? I’ll give you that.

“Well, I had just read ‘The Japanese Stone-cutter.’ Oh, I say, I now suddenly remember how a moment ago I lost my way to that poem in which I let the fisher-lad screw his ‘dark eye’ round in one direction till he must have squinted! That was a concatenation of ideas. My annoyance on that day was connected with the dangers of the Natal roadstead you know, Verbrugge, that no man-of-war is allowed to enter that part of the sea, especially in July  you see, Duclari, the west monsoon is strongest there in July, just the reverse of here. Well, the dangers of those waters connected themselves with my thwarted ambition, and this ambition again is connected with that poem about Djiva. I had repeatedly proposed to the Resident at Natal to make a breakwater, or otherwise an artificial harbour in the mouth of the river, with the object of bringing trade to the Division of Natal, which connects the important Battahlands with the sea. A million and a half of people in the interior did not know what to do with their products because the roadstead of Natal was rightly in such bad odour. Well, these proposals had not been approved by the Resident, or at least he maintained that the Government would not approve them, and you know that well-trained Residents never recommend anything but what they can tell beforehand will appeal to the Government. Making a harbour at Natal was in principle opposed to the system of the closed door, and so far from wishing to invite ships, it was even prohibited, except in cases of force majeure, to admit sailing ships to the roadstead. If in spite of this a ship happened to come—it was mostly American whalers or French ships that had loaded pepper in the independent little realms at the Northern point—I always got the Captain to write me a letter in which he asked leave to store drinking-water. My annoyance at the failure of my efforts to achieve something to the