De stille kracht. English
Page 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Leonie Van Oudijck always enjoyed her siesta. She only slept for amoment, but she loved after lunch to be alone in her cool bedroomtill five or half-past five. She read a little, mostly the magazinesfrom the circulating library, but as a rule she did nothing butdream. Her dreams were vague imaginings, which rose before heras in an azure mist during her afternoons of solitude. Nobodyknew of them and she kept them very secret, like a secret vice,a sin. She committed herself much more readily--to the world--whereher liaisons were concerned. These never lasted long; they countedfor little in her life; she never wrote letters; and the favourswhich she granted afforded the recipient no privileges in the dailyintercourse of society. Hers was a silent, correct depravity, bothphysical and moral. For her imaginings too, despite their poeticalinsipidity, were depraved. Her pet author was Catulle Mendes: sheloved all those little flowers of azure sentimentality, those rosy,affected little cupids, with one little finger in the air and theirlegs gracefully hovering around the most vicious themes and motivesof perverted passion. In her bedroom hung a few engravings: a youngwoman lying on a lace-covered bed and being kissed by two sportiveangels; another: a lion with an arrow through its breast at the feetof a smiling maiden; lastly, a large coloured advertisement of somescent or other: a sort of floral nymph whose veils were being drawnon either side by playful little cherubs, of the kind which we seeon soap-boxes. This "picture" in particular she thought splendid;she could imagine nothing with a greater aesthetic appeal. She knewthat the plate was monstrous, but she had never been able to prevailupon herself to take the horrible thing down, though it was lookedat askance by everybody: her friends, her step-children, all of whomwalked in and out of her room with the Indian casualness which makesno secret of the toilet. She could stare at it for minutes on end,as though bewitched; she thought it perfectly charming; and her owndreams resembled this print. She also treasured a chocolate-box witha keepsake picture on it, as the type of beauty which she admired,even above her own: the pink flush on the cheeks, the brown eyes underunconvincing golden hair, the bosom showing through the lace. Butshe never committed herself in respect of this absurdity, which shevaguely suspected; she never spoke of these prints and boxes, justbecause she knew that actually they were hideous. But she thoughtthem lovely; for her they were delightful, were artistic and poetical.
These were her happiest hours.
Here, at Labuwangi, she dared not do what she did in Batavia; andhere, at Labuwangi, people hardly believed what people in Bataviasaid. Nevertheless, Mrs. van Does averred that this resident andthat inspector--the one travelling for his pleasure, the other on anofficial circuit--staying for a few days at the residency, had foundtheir way in the afternoon, during the siesta, to Leonie's bedroom. Butall the same at Labuwangi any such actual occurrences were the rarestof interludes between Mrs. van Oudijck's rosy afternoon visions.
Still, this afternoon it seemed as though, after dozing a littlewhile and after all the dullness caused by the journey and the heathad cleared away from her milk-white complexion--it seemed, now thatshe was looking at the romping angels of the scent-advertisement, thather thoughts were no longer dwelling on those rosy, tender, doll-likeforms, but as though she were listening to the sounds outside....
She was wearing nothing but a sarong, which she had pulled up under herarms and hitched in a twist across her breast. Her beautiful fair hairhung loose. Her pretty little white feet were bare: she had not evenput on her slippers. And she looked through the slats of the shutters.
Between the flower-pots, which, standing on the side steps of thehouse, masked her windows with great masses of foliage, she couldsee an annexe consisting of four rooms, the spare-rooms, one of whichwas Theo's.
She stood peering for a moment and then set the shutter ajar. Andshe saw that the shutter of Theo's room also opened a little way....
Then she smiled; she knotted her sarong more closely and lay downupon the bed again.
She listened.
In a moment she heard the gravel grating slightly under the pressureof a slipper. Her shutters, without being closed, were drawn to. Ahand now opened them cautiously....
She looked round smiling:
"What is it, Theo?" she asked.
He came nearer. He was dressed in pyjamas and he sat on the edge ofthe bed and played with her soft white hands and suddenly he kissedher fiercely.
At that instant a stone whizzed through the bedroom.
They both started, looked up, and in a moment were both standing inthe middle of the room.
"Who threw that?" she asked.
"One of the boys, perhaps," he said: "Rene or Ricus, playing aboutoutside."
"They aren't up yet."
"Or something may have fallen from above...."
"But it was thrown...."
"A stone so often gets loose...."
"But this is gravel."
She picked up the little stone. He looked outside cautiously:
"It's nothing, Leonie. It must really have fallen out of the gutter... and then bounced up again. It's nothing."
"I'm frightened," she murmured.
He laughed almost aloud and asked:
"But why?"
They had nothing to fear. The room lay between Leonie's boudoirand two large spare-rooms, which were reserved exclusively forresidents, generals and other highly-placed officials. On theother side of the middle gallery were Van Oudijck's rooms--hisoffice and his bedroom--and Doddie's room and the room of the boys,Ricus and Rene. Leonie was therefore isolated in her wing, betweenthe spare-rooms. It made her cynically insolent. At this hour, thegrounds were quite deserted. For that matter, she was not afraidof the servants. Oorip was wholly to be trusted and often receivedhandsome presents: sarongs; a gold clasp; a long diamond kabaai-pin,which she wore as a jewelled silver plaque on her breast. As Leonienever grumbled, was generous in advancing wages and displayed anapparently easy-going temperament--although everything always happenedas she wished--she was not disliked; and, whatever the servants mightknow about her, they had never yet betrayed her. It made her all themore insolent. A curtain hung before a passage between her bedroomand boudoir; and it was arranged, once and for all, between Theo andLeonie, that at the least danger he would slip away quietly behind thishanging, go out through the garden-door of the boudoir and pretend tobe looking at the rose-trees in the pots on the steps. This would makeit appear as though he had just come from his own room and were merelyinspecting the roses. The inner doors of the boudoir and bedroom wereusually locked, because Leonie declared frankly that she did not liketo be interrupted unawares.
She liked Theo, because of his fresh youthfulness. And here, atLabuwangi, he was her only vice, not counting a passing inspector andthe little pink angels. The two were now like naughty children; theylaughed silently, in each other's arms. It was past four by this time;and they heard the voices of Rene and Ricus in the garden. They weretaking possession of the grounds for the holidays. They were thirteenand fourteen years old; and they revelled in the garden. They ran aboutbarefoot, in blue striped pyjamas, and went to look at the horses, atthe pigeons; they teased Doddie's cockatoo, which tripped about on theroof of the outhouses. They had a tame squirrel. They hunted geckos,those large-headed lizards, which they shot with a blow-pipe, to thegreat vexation of the servants, because the geckos bring luck. Theybought roasted monkey-nuts at the gate of a passing Chinaman and thenmocked him, imitating his accent, his difficulty with his r's:
"Loasted monkey-nuts!... Chinaman kaput!"
They climbed into the flamboyant and swung in the brancheslike monkeys. They flung stones at the cats; they incited theneighbour's dogs to bark themselves hoarse and bite one another'sears to pieces. They splashed about with the water in the pond,made themselves unpresentable with mud and dirt and dared to pluckthe Victoria Regias, which was strictly forbidden. They tested thebearing-power of the flat, green Victoria-leaves, which looked liketea-trays, and tried to stand on them and tumbled in. Then they tookempt
y bottles, set them in a row and bowled at them with roundedflints. Then, with bamboos, they fished up all sorts of unspeakablefloating things from the ditch beside the house and threw them ateach other. Their inventive fancy was inexhaustible; and the hourof the siesta was their special hour. They had caught a gecko anda cat and were making them fight each other; the gecko opened itsjaws, which were like a small crocodile's, and hypnotized the cat,which slunk away, withdrawing from its enemy's beady, black eyes,arching its back and bristling with terror. And after that the boysate themselves ill with unripe mangoes.
Leonie and Theo had watched the fight between the cat and gecko throughthe slats of the shutter and now saw the boys quietly eating the unripemangoes on the grass. But it was now the hour when the prisoners,twelve in number, worked in the grounds, under the supervision of adignified old native overseer, with a little cane in his hand. Theyfetched water in tubs and watering-cans made out of paraffin-tins,sometimes in the actual paraffin-tins themselves, and watered theplants, the grass and the gravel. Then they swept the grounds witha loud rustle of coco-nut-fibre brooms.
Rene and Ricus, behind the overseer's back, for they were afraid ofhim, threw half-eaten mangoes at the prisoners and called them namesand made faces and grimaces at them. Doddie appeared after her nap,carrying her cockatoo on her wrist. It cried, "Kaka! Ka-ka!" andraised its yellow crest with swift movements of its neck.
And Theo now stole behind the curtain into the boudoir, and, at amoment when the boys were running and bombarding each other withmangoes, and when Doddie was strolling towards the pond with theloitering gait and the swing of the hips peculiar to the Creole, hecame from behind the plants, smelling at the roses and behaving asthough he had been walking in the garden before going to take his bath.