The Hidden Force

by Louis Couperus

  But his disharmony with the Prince—only one of character, which had never developed into actual conflict, since he could after all wind the chap round his little finger!—was the only major difficulty that had occasionally troubled him in all these years. He would not have wanted to swap his life as a commissioner for any other. Oh, he was already fretting about what he would do later when he had retired. He would prefer to stay in the service for as long as possible; member of the Council of the Indies, vice-president… His secret ambition, far in the distance, was the position of governor general. However, at present there was a strange furore in Holland for appointing outsiders to the top posts—Dutchmen, wet behind the ears, who knew absolutely nothing about the Indies—instead of sticking to the principle of appointing Indies veterans, who had climbed from trainee-controller and knew the whole official hierarchy like the back of their hand… Well, what would he do after retirement? Live in Nice? Without money? Because saving was hopeless; life was comfortable, but expensive, and instead of saving he was running up debts. Well, that didn’t matter for now, that would be paid off, but later, later, later… The future, retirement, was a far from pleasant prospect. Vegetating in The Hague, in a poky house, drinking in gentlemen’s clubs with the old fogies… gave him the shivers. He wouldn’t think about it; in fact, he didn’t want to think about the future at all; he might be dead before then. For now it was splendid, his work, his house, the Indies. Nothing at all could compare with it.

  Léonie had listened to him, smiling all the while; she knew his secret raptures, his passion for his work—what she called his worship of the Colonial Administration. She accepted it; she had nothing against it. She too appreciated the luxury of the life of a district commissioner. The relative isolation didn’t matter to her, since she was mostly self-sufficient… She replied with a smile, content, charming, with her milky complexion, which was even whiter under the light dusting of rice powder that contrasted with the red silk of the kimono, and beautifully framed by her wavy blond hair.

  That morning, for a moment, she had been out of humour, had found Labuwangi with its dreary provincial air oppressive after Batavia. But since then she had been given a large gemstone, since then she had Theo back… His room was close to hers. And it would be a long time before he was able to find a position.

  Those were her thoughts, while her husband, after the pleasure of confessing his innermost thoughts, still lay in blissful contemplation. Her reflections went no deeper than that, anything resembling remorse would have astonished her profoundly, had she been capable of feeling anything of the sort… It was gradually growing dark, the glowing moon was already rising, and beyond the velvety plump banyans, beyond the crowns of the coconut palms, which waved about and stuck up into the air like ceremonial bunches of dark ostrich feathers, the last rays of the sun gave a dull, blurred, golden reflection, against which the plumpness of the banyans and the stateliness of the coconut palms stood out as if etched in black.

  From the distance came the monotonous, melancholy sound of a native gamelan percussion orchestra, its notes like a limpid piano line punctuated by deep dissonants…

  6

  VAN OUDIJCK, in a good mood because of the presence of his wife and children, was keen to go for a drive, and horses were hitched to the landau. He looked out with a jovial, amiable expression from beneath the wide gold braid of his cap. Beside him, Léonie was wearing a new mauve muslin dress, from Batavia, and a hat trimmed with mauve poppies. In the provinces a woman’s hat is a luxury, a mark of elegance, and Doddy, seated opposite her, hatless in provincial style, was silently annoyed and felt that Mama might have told her that she was going to “use” a hat. Now she looked so drab beside Mama, she couldn’t stand those smiling poppies! Only René had accompanied them, in a clean white suit. The head attendant sat on the box next to the coachman and held against his hip the large gold parasol, a symbol of authority. It was past six and already growing dark. It was at this time of day that a velvety silence, that tragic mystery of the twilit atmosphere of east monsoon days, settled over everything. The occasional bark of a dog or the coo of a wood pigeon was all that broke the unreal silence, like in a ghost town. But the carriage rattled right through it, and the horses trampled the silence to shreds. They encountered no other carriages, the absence of any sign of human life casting a spell over the gardens and verandas. A few young men were strolling about and raised their hats. The carriage had left the main avenues and entered the Chinese quarter, where the lights were being lit in the little shops. Business was more or less over: the Chinese were resting, their legs stretched out in front of them, or crossed one over the other in a general air of inactivity. When the carriage approached they got up and remained standing respectfully. The Javanese—those who had been well brought-up and had manners—crouched down. At the roadside, lit by small paraffin lamps, was a line of portable kitchens, harbouring drink vendors and pastry sellers. Countless little lights glowed in the evening dusk, grubby and garish, revealing the Chinese stalls crammed with merchandise, a jumble of red and gold characters and plastered with red and gold labels with inscriptions on them; at the back was the family altar with the sacred print of the white god, seated, and behind him the leering black god.

  Suddenly the road widened and became more respectable. Houses of wealthy Chinese loomed gently out of the darkness. Especially striking was the palatial white villa of a wealthy former opium dealer who had made his fortune in the days before opium regulation, a shining palace of elegant stucco with countless outbuildings, the gates of the front veranda in a monumental Chinese style, grandly elegant in muted gold tones. At the back of the open house stood the huge family altar, the print of the gods resplendent in light, amid a mannered garden laid out with winding paths, exquisitely filled pots and tall flower vases glazed dark blue-green and containing precious dwarf plants. All this had passed from father to son—and all was kept in a state of sparkling tidiness, with a well-tended neatness of detail: the prosperous, spotlessly clean luxury of a Chinese opium millionaire. But not all the Chinese houses were so ostentatiously visible, most lay hidden in gardens behind high walls, shut off, retreating into their secretive family life. Suddenly the houses petered out and the wide road became lined with Chinese graves, opulent tombs. A grass mound with a bricked entrance—the entrance to death—was raised up in the symbolic shape of the female organ—the gateway to life. An ample lawn surrounded it (to the great annoyance of Van Oudijck, who calculated how much agricultural land had been lost to the graves of these rich Chinese). The Chinese seemed to triumph in life and death in the town that was otherwise so quiet and mysterious. It was the Chinese who gave it its real character of hectic coming and going, trade, making fortunes, living and dying. When the carriage entered the Arab quarter—ordinary houses, but gloomy, lacking style, fortune and human existence, hidden behind thick doors; at one, true, there were chairs on the front veranda, but the man of the house squatted gloomily on the ground, motionless, following the carriage with his black eyes—this part of town seemed even more tragically mysterious than the distinguished parts of Labuwangi, and the ineffable mystery seemed to billow out like an aspect of Islam across the whole town, as if it were Islam that spread a dark cloud of the fatal melancholy of resignation in the trembling, soundless evening… They could feel it in their trundling carriage, having been used to that atmosphere since childhood and no longer sensitive to the sombre mystery that was like the approach of a black power, which from the start had breathed over them—the unsuspecting rulers with their Creole blood. Perhaps when Van Oudijck occasionally read in the newspapers about pan-Islamism, he caught a whiff, or the black power, the sombre mystery, opened to his innermost thoughts. But like now, out for a drive with his wife and children in the rattling carriage—the clip-clop of his fine Australian horses, the attendant with the closed parasol that glittered like a cluster of sun’s rays—he felt too much himself, with his ruler’s and conqueror’s nature, to have any inkling of
the black mystery or catch any glimpse of the black peril. And more especially because he felt too much at ease to sense or see anything melancholy. In his optimism he did not even see the decline of his town, which he loved; he did not notice, as they drove on, the huge colonnaded villas that bore witness to the former wealth of planters—abandoned, neglected, in overgrown grounds; one of them occupied by a lumber company that had allowed its foreman to occupy the house and pile planks in the front garden. The deserted houses loomed sad and white, their pillared porticoes casting shapes that gleamed eerily in the moonlight, like temples of doom… But seated in their carriage, enjoying the gentle rocking motion, they did not see it like that: Léonie dozed and smiled, and Doddy, now they were approaching Long Avenue once more, had her eyes peeled looking for Addy…

  BOOK II

  1

  ONNO ELDERSMA, the secretary, was busy. Every day the post brought an average of several hundred letters and documents to the commissioner’s office, which employed two senior clerks, numerous native scribes and office assistants, and the commissioner complained as soon as they fell behind with their work. He himself worked hard and he demanded the same of his staff. But sometimes they were deluged with documents, claims and applications. Eldersma was a typical civil servant, completely wrapped up in his administrative work and always busy. He worked morning, noon and night. He didn’t take a siesta. He ate a quick dish of rice at four in the afternoon, and had a brief rest. Fortunately he had a sound, strong, Frisian constitution, but he needed all his energy and his nerves for his work. It wasn’t just scribbling, red tape—it was pencraft, muscular work, nervous work, and it went on and on. He was burning up, wearing himself out as he wrote. He no longer had any other ideas, he was nothing but a civil servant, a bureaucrat. He had a charming house, the sweetest, most exceptional wife, a charming child, but he never saw them. He lived only vaguely in his home surroundings. He just worked, conscientiously, finishing what he could. Sometimes he told the commissioner that he could not possibly do any more. But on this point Van Oudijck was inexorable, pitiless. He had been district secretary himself, and knew what it meant. It meant work, it meant plodding along like a carthorse. It meant living, eating and sleeping with pen in hand. Then Van Oudijck would show him this and that piece of work that had to be finished, and Eldersma, who had said that he could do no more than he was doing, would finish the work, and so always did a little more than he thought he could.

  Then his wife, Eva, would say: my husband isn’t human any more—he’s a civil servant. The young wife, very European, who had never before been in the Indies and who been in Labuwangi for a year or so, had never known that one could work as hard as her husband did in a place as hot as Labuwangi was in the east monsoon. At first she had fought against it, and had tried to assert her rights over him, but when she saw that he really hadn’t a minute to spare, she waived those rights. She had immediately realized that her husband would not share her life, nor she his, not because he was not a good husband who was very fond of his wife, but simply because the mail brought two hundred documents daily. She had seen at once that in Labuwangi—where there was nothing—she would have to console herself with her house and, later, her child. She arranged her house as a temple to art and home comforts, and racked her brains over her little boy’s education. A highly cultured woman, she came from an artistic background. Her father was Van Hove, a well-known landscape painter, and her mother, Stella Couberg, a famous concert singer. Eva had grown up in a home filled with art and music, which she had absorbed from an early age from children’s books and nursery rhymes, then she had married an East Indies civil servant and accompanied him to Labuwangi. She loved her husband, a strapping Frisian fellow, with enough education to have wide interests. She had gone with him to the Indies, happy in her love and full of illusions about the Eastern mystery of the tropics. She had tried to hold on to her illusions, despite many warnings. In Singapore she had been struck by the bronze sculptured bodies of the naked Malays and the multicoloured orientalism of the Chinese and Arab quarters, the chrysanthemum-scented poetry of the Japanese tea-houses she passed… But very soon, in Batavia, grey disillusionment drizzled down over her expectations of seeing beautiful sights everywhere in the Indies, like in a fairy tale out of the Arabian Nights. The routine of petty, ordinary, everyday life dampened all her enthusiasm to admire, and she suddenly saw all that was ridiculous, even before she could see any beauty. The men in pyjama bottoms and loose jackets stretched out on their reclining chairs, their legs stretched out on the extended slats, their feet—although very well cared for—bare, and the toes moving in an easygoing game of big and little toes, even as she passed… Or the ladies in sarongs and loose jackets—the only practical morning wear, which can be quickly changed two or three times before noon, but which suits so few people; the sarong, with its straight fall at the back is particularly angular and ugly, however elegant and expensive the garment. The banality of the houses with all their whitewash and tar and ugly rows of flowerpots; the parched, scorched look of nature, the filthiness of the natives… All those little absurdities in European colonial life: the accents punctuated with exclamations, the provincial airs and graces of the civil servants—the members of the Council of the Indies being the only ones entitled to wear a top hat; the strictly observed points of etiquette, such as when the senior official was first to leave a reception, and the others waited their turn… And the little tropical idiosyncrasies, such as the use of wooden Devoe-paint crates and paraffin tins for every conceivable purpose: the wood for shop windows, dustbins and home-made furniture; the tins for gutters, watering cans and every kind of domestic utensil… The young, highly cultured young woman, with her fantasies of the Arabian Nights, not distinguishing in these first impressions between colonialism—the ways of the European who settles in a country alien to his blood—and what was truly poetic and belonged genuinely to the Indies, was authentically Eastern, purely Javanese—the young woman, because of all these absurdities and many others besides, had immediately felt disappointed, as anyone with an artistic bent does in the colonial Indies, which are not at all poetic or artistic, and where people carefully pile as much horse manure as possible around the roses in white pots as a fertilizer, so that when a breeze gets up the scent of roses mingles with the stench of freshly watered manure. And she was unjust, as were all new Dutch arrivals, towards the beautiful country that they wished to see according to their preconceived notion of colonialism. And she forgot that the country itself, originally so beautiful, was not to blame for that absurdity.