Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/176

 “If I don’t get to know more about this I’ll bring my own omelette next time,” complained Verbrugge.

“Believe me, there is nothing else behind it than that. He had a great many turkeys and I had nothing. They drove those fowls past my door I took one and said to the man who imagined he was looking after them: ‘Tell the General that I, Max Havelaar, take this turkey because I want to eat.

“And then that epigram?”

“Has Verbrugge spoken to you about that?”

“Yes.”

“That had nothing to do with the turkey. I made the thing because he suspended so many officials. There were at Padang quite seven or eight whom with more or less justification he had suspended from their offices, and several of them deserved it much less than I. The Assistant-Resident of Padang even had been suspended, and that for a reason which, I believe, was quite different from that stated in the Order. I don’t mind telling you this, although I cannot assure you that I know it all exactly, and though I only repeat what in the Chinese Church at Padang they took to be the truth, and what indeed—especially in view of the known peculiarities of the General—may have been true.

“He had, you must know, married his wife to win a wager, and with it an ‘anchor’ of wine. So he often went out of an evening to gad about everywhere. The supernumerary Valkenaar was said on one occasion in a small street near the girls’ orphanage to have so strictly respected his incognito as to have given him a thrashing as he would to a ‘common’ street-arab. Not far from there lived the English Miss X. There was a rumour that this Miss X had given birth to a child which had disappeared. The Assistant-Resident was obliged as head of the police, and it was also indeed his intention, to go into this matter, and he ap-