 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 which led him toward that lucrative
position which he now filled. Being of a modest and diffident nature, his
successes amazed, almost frightened him, and ended - as he got over the
succeeding shocks of surprise - by making him ferociously conceited. He believed
in his genius and in his knowledge of the world. Others should know of it also;
for their own good and for his greater glory. All those friendly men who slapped
him on the back and greeted him noisily should have the benefit of his example.
For that he must talk. He talked to them conscientiously. In the afternoon he
