Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/50

 mistaken conception of pity or hypersensitiveness. Such is my principle. I’d rather give this same Bastians three guilders out of my own pocket, than go on paying him the seven hundred guilders a year which he no longer earns. I have calculated that this man has received in income, during the past thirty-four years—both from Last & Co. and from Last & Meyer, but the Meyers are out of it—the sum of nearly fifteen thousand guilders, and this, for a modest middle-class man, is not a bad little sum. There are not many in his class who possess as much as that. So he has nothing to complain of. This calculation was suggested to me by that article of Shawlman on multiplication.

This Shawlman writes a good hand, I thought. Besides, he looked shabby, and didn’t know the time how would it be, I thought, if I gave him Bastians’s place? I should of course tell him that he must call me “Sir,” but no doubt he would understand this of his own accord, for naturally a clerk cannot address his employer by his name, and so he would probably be settled for life. He might start on four or five hundred guilders—our Bastians also worked a long time before he was advanced to seven hundred guilders—and I should at the same time be doing a good action. Why, there is no reason why he shouldn’t start on three hundred guilders, for as he has never been in business, he might look upon the first few years as an apprenticeship, and this would be quite reasonable, for he could not expect to place himself on a level with people who have worked much. I feel quite sure he would be satisfied with two hundred guilders. But I felt uneasy about his conduct he wore a shawl, you know! And besides, I didn’t know where he lived.

A couple of days after this, young Stern and Frits returned from a book-sale in “The Arms of Berne.” I had forbidden Frits to buy anything, but Stern, who has plenty of pocket-money, came home with some rubbish. That’s his affair. But Frits told me that he had seen Shawlman, who appeared to be employed at the sale. He took the books down from the shelves, and pushed them for-