Child of All Nations Read Online Free PDF

ring, especially a two-carat one, was like a legend from the heavens, not something of this earth. What need did they have of the police?
    On arriving home, I went straight to my room. Once inside, I began to relax. The wardrobe no longer housed any accursed object. The police would do their job and search out Robert in the Netherlands. The Suurhofs would have to understand; their son would have to accept the consequences of his actions.
    If I had not acted, perhaps those old people and their children would still go on living in a fantasy world forever. It would only hurt them all in the end. And me? I had been able to resolve quite a difficult problem, to balance pity and justice—and still ensure triumph of principle.
    And more than that: I had overcome my own weakness of heart, overcome out-of-place sentimentality. I saw all this as a personal victory.

2
    I t was none other than Mama who said: A name can change a hundred times a day, but the object itself stays the same. The bureaucrats and aristocrats of Java, my people, liked to give themselves wonderful names as adornments to impress everything and everyone around them, including themselves, with the beauty of these names. Shakespeare, that English dramatist, never knew the powerful men of Java who liked to wax lyrical with names, to ensconce their positions and offices in the security of names. A clerk likes to use the name
Sastra
, meaning “of letters,” so
Sastradiwirya
will mean a clerk who is good and firm of will. A bureaucrat
priyayi
in charge of irrigation will strengthen his standing with the name
Tirta
, meaning water, so
Tirtanta
will mean an official who administers irrigation.
    What’s in a name? People called me Minke. Perhaps it was indeed a mispronunciation of the word monkey. But it is a name, and it will still make me respond if I hear it called out.
    Is it true that a name cannot change the subject of a thing? Was Shakespeare right? For the time being we’ll have to reject thattheory. Take, for example, Robert Jan Dapperste, the Native child who was adopted by the preacher Dapperste. His body was thin and weak. He always needed protection and support. Every day he was the object of insults; he was called
de Lafste
, the most cowardly. The more people he came to know, the more he became the object of insults and laughter. Because of a name, just a name, he developed into a shy, introverted person, full of resentment and cunning.
    Yet he was loyal to people who helped him and protected him, who didn’t insult or torment him. He ran away from his adoptive parents because of that name too. Now he had obtained a determination of the governor-general of the Netherlands Indies. He had a new name: Panji Darman. And he himself had indeed changed. Imagine: Only three weeks after obtaining his new name, he had already become happy, free of the name Dapperste, free of any burden, with his good characteristics unchanged. And he turned out to be a very courageous person.
    While still so young, two years younger than I, he was ready to carry out Mama’s order to escort Annelies to the Netherlands or wherever else she might be taken.
    I will not say much about him. It will be enough if I show you his letters. They are in the order in which they were written.
    I write this letter on board a ship heading for
Betawi,
on the Java Sea, this calm and windless day. Mama and my good Minke, this is the first time I have sailed on a ship. Even so I have had no chance to dwell on my own feelings.
    Before boarding the ship, my carriage waited at the edge of the road, waiting for the carriage that was bringing Madame Annelies. I saw several other people sitting along the side of the road also waiting to see Annelies pass. It seems that newspaper reports about Madame Annelies being taken away from Mama and Minke and being sent back to the Netherlands had spread by word of mouth, and had reached right down into the villages. There were many people who felt they must come