Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/222

 only point to the difficult position of a man who, in an entirely different sense than by virtue of a spoken formula, considers himself bound by his duty.

For Havelaar this difficulty was greater even than it would have been in the case of some others, because his nature was gentle, in entire contradiction to his penetration, which the reader will by now have discovered to have been uncommonly keen. He, therefore, had not only to wrestle with the fear of men or with anxiety about his career and promotion, nor merely with the duties devolving on him as a husband and father, he had to conquer an enemy in his own heart. He could not without suffering see sorrow; it would take too long to give examples of the manner in which he would protect an opponent against himself even where he had been injured and insulted. He told Duclari and Verbrugge how in his youth he had found something alluring in sword-duelling, which was the truth but he did not add how, after wounding his antagonist, he would be moved to tears, and would, like a sister of mercy, tend his former enemy until he had recovered. I might relate how at Natal, when a chained convict had fired on him, he called the man before him, spoke kindly to him, had him fed and given more liberty than the others, because he fancied he had discovered that the exasperation of this prisoner was the result of too severe a sentence elsewhere passed. It was usual for the gentleness of his heart to be either denied or thought ridiculous. Denied by those who confounded his heart with his mind. Thought ridiculous by those who could not understand how a sensible person could take trouble to save a fly that had become entangled in a spider’s web. Denied again then by everyone—except Tine—who after this heard him abusing those “stupid insects” and “stupid nature” that created such insects.

But there was still another way of dragging him down from the pedestal on which those around him—whether they liked him or not—felt morally compelled to place him. “Yes, he witty; but  his wit is volatile”; or “He  intellectual, but  he does