Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/85

 tual plane; and I have often asked myself whether many errors that among men have the force of law, many crooked notions that we mistake for rectitude, might possibly result from the fact that men have too long sat with the same company in the same travelling-coach. The leg which you had to push out to the left between the hat-box and the basket of cherries the knee you held pressed against the carriage door, so that the lady opposite might not think you intended an attack on crinoline or virtue  the foot with corns that was so frightened of the heels of the commercial traveller next to you  the neck you were so long compelled to turn to the left because there was a drip on the right of you  all these, you see, must in the end become necks, knees, and feet that have something distorted about them. I think it is a good thing now and then to change carriages or seats or fellow passengers. It enables one to turn one’s neck in another direction, one can from time to time move one’s knee, and perhaps sometimes for a change one may have next to one a lady with dancing shoes, or a little boy whose short legs do not reach the floor. It gives one a better chance of seeing straight and walking upright as soon as one has once more the solid ground under one’s feet.

Now I do not know whether in the coach which stopped in front of the pendoppo there was anything that opposed the “solution of continuity,” but there is no doubt that it took a long time before anything emerged from it. It seemed that a battle of courtesies was going on. One heard the words: “If you please, Mrs. Havelaar!” and “Resident!” However, at last a gentleman descended, who both in bearing and appearance showed a suggestion of the Saurians I spoke about just now. As we shall see him again, I may as well tell you at once that his immobility could not exclusively be attributed to assimilation with the travelling-coach, for, even when there was no carriage anywhere near for miles, he still displayed a calmness, a slowness, and a cautiousness, which would make many a Saurian envious, and which in the eyes of a large number of people are the hallmarks of gentility, of composure, and