The Hidden Force

by Louis Couperus

  Mrs Van Does looked at her with amusement, and then said to Doddy and Theo, cheerfully, “That mama of yours… sharp! She sees right away!”

  “Just a joke, Mrs Van Oudijck. I just wanted to see if you knew about jewels. Of course, on my word of honour, I’d never sell them… But these… look…”

  And solemnly, almost religiously, she now opened the other jar, which contained only a few stones. She laid them lovingly on the black velvet.

  “That one would be marvellous… for a leontine,” said Mrs Van Oudijck, peering at a large gem.

  “Well, what did I tell you?” asked the Eurasian lady.

  And they all gazed at the stones, the genuine ones, those from the “real” jar, and held them carefully to the light.

  Mrs Van Oudijck could see they were all genuine.

  “I really have no money, dear lady!” she said.

  “This big one… for the leontine… six hundred guilders… a bargain, I assure you, madam!”

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly, madam!”

  “How much then? You will be making a good purchase. Poor thing, her husband used to be a big noise. Council of the Indies.”

  “Two hundred…”

  “Kassian! Two hundred!”

  “Two hundred and fifty, but no more. I really don’t have any money.”

  “The Commissioner…” whispered Mrs Van Does, sensing the approach of Van Oudijck, who, now the hearing was over, was heading towards the back veranda. “The Commissioner… he’ll buy it for you!”

  Mrs Van Oudijck smiled and looked at the sparkling drop of light on the black velvet. She liked jewellery and was not entirely indifferent to precious stones.

  She looked up at her husband.

  “Mrs Van Does is showing us lots of nice things,” she said soothingly.

  Van Oudijck felt a jolt of displeasure. He never enjoyed seeing Mrs Van Does in his house. She was always selling something; on one occasion batik-dyed bedspreads, on another woven slippers, and on a third occasion splendid but very expensive table runners, with gold batik flowers on yellow glazed linen. Mrs Van Does always brought something with her, was always in touch with the wives of former “big noises”, whom she helped to sell things, for a very steep commission. A morning visit from Mrs Van Does cost him at least a few guilders and very frequently fifty guilders, since his wife had a calm way of buying things she didn’t need, but was too indifferent not to buy from Mrs Van Does. He didn’t see the two jars at once, but he saw the drop of light on the black velvet, and realized that this time the visit would cost more than fifty guilders, unless he were very firm.

  “My dear lady!” he said in alarm. “It’s the end of the month; there’s no way we can buy jewels today! And jars of them at that,” he cried, horrified, now seeing them sparkling on the table, among the glasses of tamarind syrup.

  “Oh, that Commissioner!” laughed Mrs Van Does, as though a commissioner were always rich.

  Van Oudijck hated that laugh of hers. To run his household cost him a few hundred guilders or so more than his salary each month; he was eating into his savings and had debts. His wife never bothered with money matters; she reserved her most radiant indifference for them.

  She made the stone sparkle for a moment; it flashed a blue ray.

  “It’s wonderful… for two hundred and fifty.”

  “Let’s say three hundred then, dear lady…”

  “Three hundred?” she asked dreamily, playing with the jewel.

  Whether it was three or four or five hundred, it was all the same to her. It left her completely indifferent. But she thought the stone was beautiful and was determined to have it, whatever the price. And so she put it down gently and said:

  “No, madam, really… the stone is too expensive, and my husband has no money.”

  She said it so sweetly that her intention was impossible to guess. She was adorable in her self-denial. As she spoke the words, Van Oudijck felt a second jolt. He couldn’t refuse his wife anything.

  “Madam,” he said. “You can leave the stone here… for three hundred guilders. But for goodness’ sake, take your jars away with you.”

  Mrs Van Does looked up triumphantly.

  “Well… what did I tell you? I knew the Commissioner would buy for you…”

  Mrs Van Oudijck looked up with a gently reproachful look.

  “But Otto!” she said. “How could you?”

  “Do you like the stone?”

  “Yes, it’s wonderful… but so much money! For one stone!”

  And she pulled her husband’s hand towards her and allowed him to kiss her on the forehead, since he had been allowed to buy her a three-hundred-guilder jewel. Doddy and Theo winked at each other.

  4

  LÉONIE VAN OUDIJCK always enjoyed her siesta. She slept only briefly, but loved being alone in her cool room after the rijsttafel until five o’clock or five-thirty in the afternoon. She read a little, usually the magazines from the circulating library, but mainly she did nothing and daydreamed. Vague blue-tinted fantasies filled her periods of afternoon solitude. No one knew about them and she kept them strictly secret, like a hidden sin, a vice. She was much more inclined to reveal herself to the world when it came to an affair. They never lasted long and didn’t count for much in her life; she never wrote letters, and the favours she granted never gave the privileged one any rights in daily discourse. This made her silently and decorously perverse, both physically and morally. Her fantasies too, however limply poetic, were perverse. Her favourite author was Catulle Mendès: she liked all those flowerlets of sky-blue sentimentality, those pink affected Cupids, little fingers in the air, little legs charmingly fluttering—framing the most degenerate motifs and themes of perverted passion. In her bedroom there were a few pictures: a young woman lying back on a lace-covered bed, and kissed by two romping angels; another, a lion with its breast pierced by an arrow, at the feet of a smiling maiden; a large advertising poster for perfume—a kind of flower nymph, whose veil was being torn off on all sides by playful cherubs. She was particularly fond of that picture, and couldn’t imagine anything more aesthetic. She knew it was monstrous, but she had never been able to bring herself to take down the frightful thing, even though people looked disapprovingly at it—her friends and her children, who walked in and out of her room with that casualness typical of the Indies, which makes no secret of the act of dressing. She could gaze at it for minutes on end as if enchanted; she thought it utterly charming, and her own dreams were like that in the poster. She also kept a chocolate box with a keepsake picture on it, as a kind of beauty she found even more beautiful than her own: cheeks flushed, coquettish brown eyes beneath improbably golden hair, the bosom visible beneath lace. But she never gave away what she vaguely sensed was ridiculous; she never talked about those pictures and boxes, precisely because she knew they were ugly. But she thought they were beautiful, she loved them and considered them artistic and poetic.

  These were her favourite hours.

  Here in Labuwangi she didn’t dare do what she did in Batavia, and here people could scarcely believe what was said in Batavia. Yet Mrs Van Does was adamant that “that commissioner and that inspector”—one travelling, the other on an official tour and staying at the Commissioner’s residence for a few days—had found their way to Léonie’s bedroom in the afternoon, during the siesta. But at Labuwangi such realities were rare intermezzos among Mrs Van Oudijck’s pink afternoon visions…

  Yet, this afternoon it seemed…

  As if, after having dozed off for a moment and after all the tiredness from the journey and the heat had cleared away from her milk-white complexion—as if, now she was looking at the romping angels on the perfume advert, her mind was not on all that pink doll-like tenderness, but as if she were listening for sounds from outside…

  After a while she got up.

  She was wearing only a sarong, which she had pulled up under her arms and held in a knot on her breast.

  Her splendid blond hair hu
ng loose.

  Her beautiful white feet were bare; she had not even slipped into her mules.

  And she looked through the slats of the blind.

  Between the flowerpots, which on the steps at the side of the house masked her windows with great masses of leaves, she looked out at an annexe with four rooms—the guest rooms—one of which was occupied by Theo.

  She peered for a while and then opened the blind a fraction…

  And she saw the blind of Theo’s room also open a fraction…

  Then she smiled; tied the sarong more tightly, and went back to bed.

  She listened.

  A moment later she heard a brief crunching of the gravel under the weight of a slipper. Her venetian blinds, without being locked, had closed. A hand now cautiously opened them…

  She turned, smiling…

  “What is it, Theo?” she whispered.

  He came closer, in pyjama bottoms and a linen jacket, sat down on the edge of the bed and played with her white, chubby hands, and suddenly kissed her passionately.

  At that moment a stone whizzed through the room.

  They were both startled, quickly looked up, and in a moment were in the middle of the room.

  “Who’s throwing stones?” she asked, trembling.

  “Perhaps one of the boys—René or Ricus—who are playing outside,” he said.

  “They’re not up yet…”

  “Or it might have fallen…”

  “No, it was thrown…”

  “Stones often come loose…”

  “But this is gravel.”

  She picked up the stone. He looked cautiously outside.

  “It’s nothing, Léonie. It simply must have fallen from the gutter, through the window, and then it flew up again. It’s nothing…”

  “I’m frightened,” she murmured.

  He almost laughed aloud and asked, “Of what?”

  They had nothing to fear. The room was situated between Léonie’s boudoir and the two large guest rooms intended only for commissioners, generals and other senior officials. On the other side of the central gallery were the rooms of Van Oudijck, office and bedroom, Doddy’s room and the room of the boys, Ricus and René. So Léonie was isolated in her wing, between the two guest rooms. It made her brazen. At this hour the compound was completely deserted. Anyway, she was not frightened of the servants. Urip was completely trustworthy and often received lovely presents: sarongs, a gold clasp, a long diamond jacket pin that she wore on her breast like a silver and jewelled brooch. Since Léonie never grumbled, was generous with advances on wages and had a certain apparently easygoing manner—although things only happened the way she wanted them to—she was not unpopular, and however much the servants might know, they had never betrayed her. This made her all the more shameless. In front of the passage between her bedroom and boudoir hung a curtain, and it had been agreed between Theo and Léonie that, in case of danger, he would simply slip away behind the curtain and exit through the garden door of the boudoir, as if wanting to see the rose pots on the steps. That would make it look as if he had just come from his own room and was viewing the roses. The inner doors of the boudoir and bedroom were locked as a rule, as Léonie made it quite clear that she did not care to be caught unawares.

  She liked Theo because of his fresh youthfulness. And here in Labuwangi he was her only indiscretion, apart from an inspector who happened to be passing through, and the pink angels. Now they were like naughty children, laughing silently in each other’s arms. But they had to be careful. It was four o’clock and they could hear the voices of René and Ricus in the garden. They took over the whole compound for their holiday. Aged thirteen and fourteen, they loved the big garden. Dressed in blue-striped cotton jackets and trousers, and with bare feet, they went to see the horses and the pigeons: they teased Doddy’s cockatoo, which tripped about on the roof of the outbuildings, and they had a tame squirrel. They hunted for geckos, which they shot with a blowpipe, much to the annoyance of the servants, since geckos bring good luck. At the gate they bought roast peanuts from a passing Chinese and then made fun of him, imitating his accent, “Loast peanuts! Chinaman dead!”

  They climbed the flamboyant tree and swung from the branches like monkeys. They threw stones at the cats; they taunted the neighbours’ dogs until they barked hoarsely and chewed each other’s ears. They messed around with water near the pond, making themselves unpresentable with mud and filth, and had the nerve to pick the water lilies, which was absolutely forbidden. They tested the firmness of the flat green water lily leaves—like large trays that they thought they could stand on, and went under… Then they put empty bottles in a line and pelted them with pebbles. Then, using a bamboo stick, they fished out all kinds of nameless floating debris and hurled it at each other. Their inventiveness was inexhaustible, and the hour of the siesta was their time. They had found a gecko and a cat and had made them fight: the gecko opened its miniature crocodile jaws and hypnotized the cat, which slunk off, retreating from the black beady-eyed stare—back arched, bristling with terror. And afterwards the boys made themselves ill on unripe mangoes.

  Léonie and Theo had spied on the fight between the cat and the gecko through the blind and saw the boys now sitting calmly in the grass eating unripe mangoes. But it was the time when the convicted criminals—twelve of them—worked in the compound, under the supervision of an old, dignified overseer holding a cane. They fetched water in tubs and watering cans made from paraffin tins, sometimes in actual paraffin tins, and watered the plants, the grass and the gravel. Then they swept the grounds clean with the loud swishing of palm-leaf brooms.

  Behind the back of the overseer, of whom they were afraid, René and Ricus pelted the prisoners with gnawed mangoes, called them names and pulled faces.

  Doddy came by, well rested, playing with her cockatoo, which she carried on her hand and which cried, “Kaka! Kaka!” and raised its yellow crest with swift movements of its neck.

  And Theo now slipped away behind the curtain into the boudoir, and when for a moment the boys were chasing each other in a bombardment of mangoes, and Doddy was walking towards the pond with her slouching, hip-swaying Indies gait and the cockatoo on her hand, he emerged from behind the plants, sniffed the roses and pretended he had been walking in the garden, before taking a bath.

  5

  VAN OUDIJCK FELT in a better mood than he had in weeks; after those two months of dreary tedium some sense of family life seemed to re-enter his house; he liked to see his two young scamps romping in the garden, even if they got up to all kinds of mischief, and he was especially pleased that his wife was back.

  They were sitting in the garden, in casual dress, drinking tea at five-thirty. How strange that Léonie immediately somehow filled the big house with a more comfortable conviviality, since it was what she liked. Whereas Van Oudijck usually drank a quick cup of tea, which Kario brought to his bedroom, today the afternoon tea had already grown into a pleasant hour. Cane chairs and long deckchairs had been put outside; the tea tray was placed on a cane table; fried bananas had been served; and Léonie, in a red silk Japanese kimono, with her blond hair loose, lay in a cane chair playing with Doddy’s cockatoo and feeding the bird with cake. The house was instantly transformed, thought Van Oudijck, his wife sociable, sweet, beautiful, now and then telling them about her acquaintances in Batavia, the races at Buitenzorg, a ball at the Governor General’s palace, the Italian opera; the boys cheerful, healthy, full of fun, however dirty they were from their games—and she called them over and romped with them a bit and asked about high school, where they were in the second form; and even Doddy and Theo seemed different—Doddy, now picking roses charmingly from the flowerpots and breaking into song, and Theo talkative with Mama, and even with Van Oudijck himself. Lines of pleasure played around Van Oudijck’s moustache. He still had a young-looking face and scarcely seemed forty-eight. He had an acute, lively gaze, both responsive and penetrating. He was a little thick-set and had a predisposition to bec
ome more so, but he had retained a military dash, and on official tours he was tireless; he was an excellent horseman. Tall and well-built, content with his house and family, he had a pleasant air of solid masculinity, and there were jovial lines around his moustache. Relaxing, stretched out in his cane chair, drinking his cup of tea, he expressed the thoughts that usually rose up in him at such moments of contentment. Yes, it was a pretty good life in the Indies, in the Dutch Colonial Service. At least, it had always been good for him, but then he had been fairly lucky. But nowadays the promotion situation was desperate: he knew lots of assistant commissioners who were his contemporaries and who in all those years had had no chance to become commissioners. And that was certainly a desperate state of affairs, to be in a subordinate position in relation to a superior for so long, to have await orders from a commissioner at that age. He would never have been able to tolerate it, at the age of forty-eight! But being a commissioner, giving the orders oneself, administering for oneself a district as large and important as Labuwangi, with such extensive coffee plantations, such numerous sugar factories, with so many leased concessions—that was a joy, that was living: life on the grandest, most expansive scale, with which no position or life in Holland could compare. His great responsibility was a delight for his naturally dominant nature. His work was varied: office work and tours; the priorities of his work were varied: one was not bored to death sitting in an office; after office work there was the freedom of the natural world, and there was always variety, always something different. He hoped in eighteen months’ time to become a district commissioner first class, if there was a vacancy in a first-class area: Batavia, Semarang, Surabaya, or one of the Principalities. And yet it would be a wrench to leave Labuwangi. He was attached to his district, for which for five years he had done so much that had come to fruition, to the extent that any fruition was possible in this period of general malaise: with the colonies poor, the population impoverished, coffee-growing worse than ever, sugar possibly facing a severe crisis in two years’ time… the Indies were languishing and even in industrial East Java there was the beginnings of apathy and weakness, but still he had been able to do a lot for Labuwangi. During his watch the population had increased in prosperity; the irrigation of the paddy fields was excellent, after he had been able to use tact to win over the engineer, who had at first been constantly at odds with the colonial authorities. Numerous steam tramlines had been built. The secretary, his assistant commissioners, and his controllers were devoted to him, though working under him was hard. He took a pleasant tone with them, though, despite the work being hard. He could be friendly and jovial, even though he was the commissioner. He was glad that all of them—his controllers, his assistant commissioners—represented that healthy, cheerful kind of colonial official, happy with their life and work, even though they too nowadays combed the Government Almanac and the Colonial List for news of their promotion. So it was Van Oudijck’s hobby horse to compare his officials with those of the court, who did not demonstrate that cheerful attitude: consequently there was always a slight envy and animosity between the two groups… Yes, it was a pleasant life, pleasant work, everything was fine, everything was fine. There was nothing like the Colonial Service. His only regret was that his relations with the government-appointed native prince were not easier and more pleasant. But it was not his fault. He always scrupulously gave the Prince his due, recognized his rights, supported him with the Javanese population and even with European officials. Oh, he was so deeply sorry at the death of the old prince, the father of the Prince, a noble, well-educated Javanese. He had always sympathized with the former prince, and had immediately won him over with his tact. Had he not, five years ago now, when he arrived in Labuwangi for the hand-over of power, invited the old prince—a model of a true Javanese aristocrat—to sit beside him in his own carriage, and had not, as was customary, made him follow in a second carriage behind the commissioner’s; and had he not through this act of courtesy towards the old prince immediately won over all the Javanese chiefs and officials and flattered them in their respect and love for their prince, a descendant of one of the oldest Javanese dynasties, the Adiningrats, once, in the age of the Dutch East India Company, sultans of Madura?… But as for Sunario, his son, now the young prince, he failed to understand or fathom him—he admitted this only tacitly to himself—he saw him only as a mystery, that wayang shadow puppet, as he called him, always stiff, aloof from him, the commissioner, as if he—as a prince—looked down on him, the Dutch bourgeois; and on top of that a fanatic, with no awareness of the interests of the Javanese population, absorbed solely in all kinds of superstitious practices and fanatical reflections. He did not say it in so many words, but there was something in the Prince he couldn’t grasp. He could not place the delicate figure, with his staring jet-black eyes, as a human being in practical life, as he had always been able to do with the old prince, who had always been, in accordance with his age, his paternal friend—according to colonial etiquette his “younger brother”, always co-administrator of his district. But Sunario he found a phoney, not an official, not a prince, nothing but a fanatical Javanese, who shrouded himself in so-called mystery: all nonsense, thought Van Oudijck. He laughed at the holiness that the population attributed to him. He considered him impractical, degenerate, a demented Javanese dandy!