GOING INTO BUSINESS.
The plan of “going into business” was quite attractive to Wouter. Perhaps because he did not quite know what it meant. He asked his brother Stoffel about it.
“Well—don’t you understandthat? ‘In business’ means the same thing as—as being a merchant.”
“But what shall I have to sell? And how shall I know what people want?”
“Oh, you must not imagine that you will have to go about with a peddler’s pack, and ring at people’s front doors to know if they want to buy anything. You’re a stupid; you never will understand anything. ‘In business,’ you see, means—it means——”
Stoffel began to stammer. He was not the first to stumble over a definition—and will not be the last. But there are few who, in such a case, have an ally at home to help them out.
“How can you always talk such nonsense, Wouter?” cried his mother. “There’s Stoffel, now, explaining everything to you so clearly, and there you are again making out you don’t understand. Who in the world ever told you that you would have to go about the street with a pack on your back, like an oilman or amersan de la perreplu?[15]Is that what I have brought you up for, and made you take the highest place in the school? You are an ungrateful child. What is the good of your knowing so much, and being able to make such fine letters, with curls and flourishes to them, if you must insult your own mother?”
Readers who care anything for justice, will find it strange,and perhaps unfair, that Wouter should have been overwhelmed with this flood of reproach. Unfair? Certainly! But—strange? Why, no! I solemnly affirm my accuracy in depicting a certain manner of carrying on a controversy, of which Juffrouw Pieterse was unquestionably mistress.
But now, supposing Wouter had, in all humility, remarked that he had given no occasion for the above sermon? Well, in that case he would have been overwhelmed with a second lecture on the far-reaching and infamous wickedness of being in the right, which, indeed, under certain circumstances,isa fault—and a bad one.
Multatuli.(Ideen.)
Multatuli.(Ideen.)
Multatuli.(Ideen.)
Multatuli.
(Ideen.)