Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/87

 one “creates” a person who makes a hobby of a couple of ever-returning words. I have seen a perfectly idiotic vaudeville “make a hit” because there was a man in it who kept repeating: “My name is Meyer.” Such wit is just a bit cheap, and to tell you the truth, I should be angry with you if you could find it amusing. But now it is my misfortune that I myself have to put something like this before you. From time to time I have to make someone “walk on”—I will promise to do it as little as possible—who indeed had a style of speech which I fear will draw upon me the suspicion of an abortive effort at making you laugh. And I must therefore most emphatically assure you that it is not fault, if the eminently important-looking Resident of Bantam, who is here referred to, had something so very peculiar in his mode of speaking that I find it difficult to reproduce it without the appearance of seeking an effect of wit in a stage trick. He expressed himself in such a way as to give the idea that there was a full stop after each word, or even a prolonged rest, and I can compare the space between his words with nothing better than the silence that succeeds the “amen” after a long prayer in the church, which, as everyone knows, is a signal that one has permission to move in one’s seat, or cough, or blow one’s nose. What he said was usually well considered, and if he could have broken himself of the habit of these untimely resting-points, his sentences, at any rate from a rhetorical point of view, would mostly have appeared quite sound. But all this crumbling up, this jerkiness and unevenness rendered it irksome to listen to him. And often it made one stumble. For usually, when one had begun to answer under the amiable impression that the sentence was finished, and that he left the completion of the part omitted to the sagacity of his audience, the still missing words would come along behind like the stragglers of a defeated army, and made you feel that you had interrupted him, which is always a disagreeable experience. The public of the chief centre, Serang, in so far as they were not in government service—a position which gives the majority an air of caution—described his