Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/89

 bility mirrors nothing because no soul is reflected in it. Let me say, then, that she had a beautiful soul, and one must have been blind not also to consider beautiful the face in which that soul might be read.

Havelaar was a man of thirty-five. He was slim, and alert in his movements. There was nothing remarkable in his appearance except his short and mobile upper lip and his large pale blue eyes, which, when he was in a calm mood, looked dreamy, but which shot fire when a great idea took possession of him. His fair hair hung smoothly over his temples, and I quite understand that few people, seeing him for the first time, would get the impression that they had met a man who, as regards both head and heart, belonged to the rare ones of the earth. He was a “vessel of contradictions.” Keen as a stiletto, yet gentle as a young girl, he himself was always the first to feel the wound his bitter words had inflicted, and he suffered more from it than the injured one. He was quick to understand; he grasped at once what was highest and most complicated; he delighted in solving difficult problems, and gladly devoted to this task labour and study, and intense exertions and yet often he could not understand the simplest thing, which a child might have explained to him. Full of the love of truth and justice, he often neglected his nearest and most obvious duty, in order to redress a wrong that lay higher, farther, or deeper, and that allured him by the probable need for greater effort in the struggle. He was chivalrous and brave, but often, like the other Don Quixote, wasted his valour on a windmill. He burned with insatiable ambition, which made all ordinary distinction among his fellow men appear to him worthless, and yet he placed his greatest happiness in a calm and obscure home-life. A poet in the highest conception of the word, he dreamt solar systems in a spark, peopled them with beings of his own creation, felt himself lord of a world he himself had called into existence yet could perfectly well immediately after carry on, without the slightest dreaminess, a discourse on the price of food, the rules of