Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/22

6 Now I know perfectly well that I should have had to give a little more if he had pulled out my person, but certainly not half my money. For is it not obvious that in this way one would only have to fall into the water twice to become a pauper? And the worst of such shows on the stage is that the public gets so accustomed to all these untruths, that they admire and applaud them. I should just like to throw the whole pit into the water, to see whether any of them had been in earnest about that applause. I, who like truth, give warning to everyone that, for fishing out my person, I will not pay so much salvage money. Those who are not satisfied with less, may leave me where I am. Only on a Sunday I should be prepared to give a little more, as then I wear my chased gold watch-chain and frock coat.

Yes, that same stage corrupts many, more even than do the novels. It is so spectacular! With just a little tinsel and paper-lace, everything there looks so very alluring. For children, I mean, and for people who are not in business. Even when these actor-people seek to represent poverty, their presentation is always false. A girl whose father has become a bankrupt works to keep the family. All right. There you see her on her chair sewing, knitting, or embroidering. But now you just count the stitches she makes during the whole Act. She talks, she sighs, she runs to the window, but never a stroke of work. The family that can subsist on this labour requires very little. This kind of girl is, of course, the heroine. She has thrown a few seducers down the stairs, she keeps crying: “O, my mother, O, my mother!” and therefore represents virtue. What kind of virtue is that, which takes a whole year to make a pair of woollen stockings? Does not all this inculcate false conceptions of virtue, and of “working for a living”? All silliness and lies!

Then her first lover—formerly a copying clerk, but now rolling in riches—suddenly returns, and marries her. More lies. A man with money does not marry a girl out of a firm that has failed. And if you think that on the stage this may pass as an exception, still my remark stands, that one perverts the sense of truth in the people,