Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/257

 will there be here, and the more poverty yonder. It’s God’s will that it should be so!”

I am amazed at Twaddler’s insight into business. For it is the truth that I, who am strict in religion, see my business more prosperous every year, whilst Busselinck & Waterman, who trouble neither about God nor his commandments, will only remain tricksters all their lives. The Rosemeyers also, who are in sugar and have a Catholic maid-servant, had again recently to accept five shillings in the pound from a Jew who had gone bankrupt. The more I think of it, the more I am able to discover the inscrutable ways of God. Recently again it was found that thirty million guilders clear profit was made from the sale of products supplied by the heathen, and that did not even include what I made out of it and the many others who make a living by this business. Doesn’t it seem as if the Lord said: “Here are thirty millions for your belief”? Isn’t this clearly the hand of God, who makes the wicked man labour to save the just? Isn’t this a hint to continue in the right way? A hint to have much produced over there, and to persist here in the true faith? Isn’t it therefore said: “Pray and work,” so that should pray, and have the work done by all the black rabble that knows nothing of “Our Father”?

Oh! how right is Twaddler when he calls God’s yoke light! How light is the burden made for all those who believe! I am only in the forties, and could retire if I wished to, and go to Driebergen; and just see what others come to who forsake the Lord! Yesterday I saw Shawlman with his wife and little boy: they looked like ghosts. He is as pale as death, his eyes stick out, and his cheeks are hollow. His figure stoops, although he is even younger than I. She also was very shabbily dressed, and she seemed to have been crying again. Well, of course, I had at once noticed that she had a discontented nature, for I have only to see a person once to take his measure. That is the result of experience. She wore a short thin mantle of black silk, although it was pretty cold. Not a sign of a crinoline. Her light skirt hung slack around her knees, and