Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/230

 press, especially when it leads to humiliation and insult, looked for reasons of condonation. The Regent was old, he was the head of a family whose descendants lived sumptuously in the neighbouring provinces, where much coffee was harvested, and therefore high emoluments were enjoyed. Was it not galling to him, as regards mode of living, to have to take a much lower place than his younger relatives? Besides, swayed by fanaticism, the man fancied that, as his years increased, he might purchase the salvation of his soul by subsidized pilgrimages to Mecca and alms to prayer-droning idlers. The officers who had preceded Havelaar at Lebak had not always set good examples. And finally the largeness of the Lebak family of the Regent, which lived entirely at his expense, made it difficult for him to return to the right way.

In this manner Havelaar looked for reasons to defer all severity, and to try again and still again what might be accomplished with gentleness.

And he even went beyond gentleness. With a generosity that was reminiscent of the errors that had made him so poor, he continually advanced money to the Regent on his own responsibility, so that necessity might not urge the Chief too powerfully to offence, and as usual he forgot his own interest so far that he was prepared to reduce himself and those belonging to him to the strictly necessary, in order to succour the Regent with the little he might still be able to spare from his income.

If it might still seem necessary to prove the kindliness with which Havelaar fulfilled his difficult duty, such proof might be found in an oral message he gave to the Controller when the latter was on one occasion departing for Serang: “Tell the Resident that, hearing of the abuses that here take place, he must not think that I am indifferent to them. I only do not at once report them officially because I wish to save the Regent, whom I pity, from too great severity, as I wish first to try to bring him to a sense of his duty by kindliness.”

Havelaar was often out for days. When he was at home, he was