wanted without ruining himself. In exchange he had their silent fear,
their loquacious love, their noisy veneration. It is a fine thing to be
a providence, and to be told so on every day of one's life. It gives one
a feeling of enormously remote superiority, and Willems revelled in
it. He did not analyze the state of his mind, but probably his greatest
delight lay in the unexpressed but intimate conviction that, should
he close his hand, all those admiring human beings would starve. His
munificence had demoralized them. An easy task. Since he descended
amongst them and married Joanna they had lost the little aptitude and
strength for work they might have had to put forth under the stress of
extreme necessity. They lived now by the grace of his will. This was
power. Willems loved it. In another, and perhaps a lower plane, his days
did not want for their less complex but more obvious pleasures. He liked
the simple games of skill--billiards; also games not so simple, and
calling for quite another kind of skill--poker. He had been the
aptest pupil of a steady-eyed, sententious American, who had drifted
mysteriously into Macassar from the wastes of the Pacific, and, after
knocking about for a time in the eddies of town life, had drifted out
enigmatically into the sunny solitudes of the Indian Ocean. The memory
of the Californian stranger was perpetuated in the game of poker--which
became popular in the capital of Celebes from that time--and in
a powerful cocktail, the recipe for which is transmitted--in the
Kwang-tung dialect--from head boy to head boy of the Chinese servants in
the Sunda Hotel even to this day. Willems was a connoisseur in the drink
and an adept at the game. Of those accomplishments he was moderately
proud. Of the confidence reposed in him by Hudig--the master--he was
boastfully and obtrusively proud. This arose from his great benevolence,
and from an exalted sense of his duty to himself and the world at large.
He experienced that irresistible impulse to impart information which is
inseparable from gross ignorance. There is always some one thing which
the ignorant man knows, and that thing is the only thing worth knowing;
it fills the ignorant man's universe. Willems knew all about himself.
On the day when, with many misgivings, he ran away from a Dutch
East-Indiaman in Samarang roads, he had commenced that study of
himself, of his own ways, of his own abilities, of those fate-compelling
qualities of his whi