Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/228

 informants were punished with rattan birchings, the Regent had triumphed, and the Resident returned to the head-centre, with the pleasant consciousness of again having so successfully “managed” that affair.

But then what was the Assistant-Resident to do when next day again other complaints came to him? Or—and this frequently happened—when the same complainants returned and retracted their retraction? Was he to write the matter in his notebook,  to speak about it to the Resident,  to see the same tragic farce enacted, and all this at the risk of passing in the end for a man who laid charges time and again—and that stupidly and maliciously—which always had to be dismissed as unfounded? What was to become of the highly necessary friendly relations between the principal Native Chief and the first European official, when it appeared as though the latter continually lent an ear to false complaints against that Chief? And above all, what happened to those poor complainants after they returned to their village, in the power of the district- or village-head whom they had charged as the instrument of the Regent’s tyranny?

Let us see what became of those complainants. Those that were able to escape, escaped. That was why so many Bantammers roamed about in the neighbouring provinces! That was why there were so many inhabitants of Lebak among the rebels in the Lampong districts! That was why Havelaar, in his address to the Chiefs, had asked: “What is this, that so many houses stand empty in the villages, and why do many prefer the shade of alien woods to the coolness of the forests of Bantan Kedool?”

But not everyone was able to escape. The man whose body in the morning was seen to be floating down the river, after his having the previous night, secretly, hesitatingly, tremulously, asked for an audience with the Assistant-Resident he no longer needed escape. Perhaps it might be looked upon as a humane act to save him by sudden death from a little longer life. For he was spared the ill-treatment that awaited him on his return to his