The Hidden Force

by Louis Couperus

  He received the poison-pen letters every day. They had never made any impression on him, but recently he no longer tore them up, but read them carefully and put them away in a secret drawer. Why, he could not have said. They were accusations against his wife, smears against his daughter. They were alarmist suggestions that he might be stabbed in the dark. They were warnings that his spies were totally unreliable. They told him that his rejected wife was living in poverty and hated him; they told him that he had a son whose existence he had ignored. They quietly rummaged about in all the dark, secret areas of his life and work. Despite himself, he felt depressed by them. It was all vague and he had nothing to reproach himself with. For himself and for the world he was a good official, a good husband and a good father, a good person. The fact that he was accused of having judged unfairly here, of having acted cruelly and unfairly there, of having rejected his first wife, of having an unacknowledged son living in the native quarters, the fact that people were slinging mud at Theo and Doddy—all this was making him gloomy at present. Because it was incomprehensible that anyone should behave in this way. For this practically minded man it was the vagueness that was most irritating. He would not fear an open conflict, but this shadow-boxing played on his nerves and his health. He had no inkling of why it was happening. There was nothing tangible. He could not picture the face of an enemy. And every day the letters came, and every day there was hostility in the shadows around him. It was too mystical for someone like him and was bound to make him bitter and gloomy. Then there appeared in the local newspapers pieces originating from a small, hostile press, accusations that were vague or demonstrably untrue. Hatred bubbled up everywhere. He could not think why, and pondering on the question was making him ill. He talked to no one about it and hid his pain deep inside.

  He couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t conceive why things were as they were and becoming worse. There was no logic to it. Since the logical reaction would be for them to love him, however high and mighty and strict they found him. And indeed, did he not so often temper that authoritarian severity with the genial laugh beneath the wide moustache, under a more easygoing friendliness or warning and correction? On official tours was he not the sociable commissioner, who regarded the tour with his officials as a sport, as a wonderful excursion on horseback through the coffee plantations, calling at the coffee warehouses? Did he not regard it as a pleasant trip, which relaxed the muscles after so many weeks of office work? The great procession of district heads following on their little ponies, riding their frisky mounts like nimble monkeys, flags in hand, the gamelan orchestras sprinkling their crystalline notes of welcome wherever he went, and in the evening the carefully prepared meal in the hostels and late into the night the games of cards.

  Hadn’t they said, his officials, in informal moments, that he was a commissioner after their own hearts, a tireless horseman, good company at meals and young enough to take the shawl from the dancing girl and dance with her for a moment, cleverly performing the lithe, stylized movements of the hands, feet and hips—instead of excusing himself by paying her money and letting her dance with the native official? He never felt as comfortable as on tour. And now he was gloomy, discontent, not understanding what forces were thwarting him in the dark—him, the man of honesty and light, of simple ethical principles, of serious dedication to work. He thought of going on tour soon and using the physical activity to throw off the gloom oppressing him. He would ask Theo to come with him and take some exercise for a few days. He loved his son, though he thought him unwise, rash, hot-headed, lacking perseverance in his work, never satisfied with his superiors, resisting his manager too tactlessly until he made his position untenable at yet another coffee plantation or sugar factory where he was working. He believed that Theo must make his own way in life, just as he, Van Oudijck, had done, instead of relying completely on his father’s protection and position as a district commissioner. He was not a man for nepotism. He would never prefer his son above someone else with equal rights. He had often said to nephews, who were keen on obtaining concessions in Labuwangi, that he preferred not to have relatives in his district, and that they should expect nothing from him except complete impartiality. That was how he had made it, and that was how he expected them to make it, and Theo too. And yet, he secretly observed Theo, with all his father’s love; secretly, he deeply regretted the fact that Theo lacked perseverance and no longer focused on his future, his career, an honourable place in society, based on either esteem or money. The boy lived from day to day, without a thought for tomorrow… Perhaps he was outwardly cool towards Theo: well, he would have a confidential chat with him, give him some advice, and he would ask at any rate if Theo would come on tour with him. The thought of just under six days’ riding in the pure mountain air—through the coffee plantations, inspecting the irrigation works, doing the most pleasant part of his work—so broadened his mind, clarified his outlook, that he stopped thinking about the letters. He was a man with a clear, simple view of life: of course he found life natural and not confused or complicated. His life had progressed up a visible staircase openly and gradually, with a view of a gleaming pinnacle of ambition, and he had never been able or willing to see what writhed, what churned in the dark shadows, what bubbled up from the abyss, close to his feet. He was blind to the life that operates beneath the surface. He didn’t believe in it, just as a mountain-dweller who has for a long time lived near a dormant volcano does not believe in the fire inside it, that survives deeply hidden and escapes only as hot steam or sulphurous air. He believed neither in the power above things nor in the power that resided in things themselves. He didn’t believe in silent fate or in silent gradualness. He believed only what he saw with his own eyes: in the harvest, the roads, the districts and villages, and in the prosperity of his district, in his career that he saw as an upward curve ahead of him. In this unclouded clarity of a simple male nature, in this universal axiom of just rule, just ambition and a practical sense of duty there was only one weakness: the deep tenderness that he felt for his own home, which, being blind, he did not see for what it was deep down, but only according to his fixed principles as to how his wife and his children should be.

  He had not learnt from experience, since he had loved his first wife as much as he now loved Léonie.

  He loved his wife because she was his wife—the centre of his circle. He loved the circle for its own sake and not the individuals, the links of which it was composed. He had not learnt from experience. He did not think according to life’s changing hues, he thought according to his ideas and principles. They had made him a man and made him powerful, as well as a good administrator. They had also generally made him, in accordance with his nature, a good person. But because there was so much unconscious tenderness in him, unanalysed and simply deeply felt, and because he did not believe in the hidden force, in the life hidden within—in what writhed and churned like volcanic fires under mountains of majesty, like troubles under a throne—because he did not believe in the mysticism of visible things, life could sometimes find him unprepared and weak, when—divinely serene and stronger than mankind—it deviated from what he thought logical.

  2

  THE MYSTICISM OF VISIBLE THINGS on the island of mystery called Java… outwardly a docile colony with a subject race that was no match for the rough merchants, who in the heyday of their Dutch Republic, with the youthful strength of a young nation eager and hungry for profit, rotund and cool-blooded, planted their feet and their flag in the collapsing empires, the thrones tottering as if there had been an earthquake. But deep down this island had never been conquered. Although smiling with dignified contempt—resigned, bowing to its fate—deep down, despite a grovelling veneration, it was living freely its own mysterious life, hidden from Western eyes, however hard they tried to fathom the mystery—as if there had been a philosophy of being sure to preserve one’s dignified equilibrium with a smile, giving way flexibly, apparently politely seeking rapprochement—but deep down wi
th a divine certainty about its own opinion, and so far removed from the thinking of the rulers, the civilization of the rulers, that there would never be solidarity between master and servant, because the insurmountable distance remains, that goes on proliferating in one’s mind and blood. And the Westerner, proud of his power, of his civilization, his humanity is seated high on his throne, blind, selfish, self-obsessed within the intricate mechanism of his authority within which he operates as precisely as clockwork, controlling each revolution until to the foreigner looking from outside this conquest of the visible, this colonization of a land physically and spiritually alien, appears a masterpiece, the creation of a new world.

  But beneath all this outward show lurks the hidden force, slumbering now and not ready for battle. Under all that semblance of visible things is the ominous essence of silent mysticism, like smouldering fire in the ground and like hate and mystery in the heart. Under all this calm grandeur the danger threatens, and the future rumbles like the subterranean thunder in volcanoes, inaudible to the human ear. It is as if the conquered peoples know and simply abandon the pressure of things, waiting for the sacred moment, which will come if the mysterious calculations are correct. They understand the rulers with a single searching look, see them with their illusions of civilization and humanity, and know that they do not exist. Though they give him the title of lord and the respect due to a master, they see right through his democratic businessman’s nature, and secretly despise him and judge him with a smile, comprehensible to their brothers, who smile the same way. They never contravene the code of abject servitude and with the semba greeting pretend to be inferior while secretly knowing themselves to be superior. He is aware of the unspoken hidden force: they feel the soft approach of the mystery in the sweltering hot wind from their mountains, in the silence of the mysteriously silent nights, and he has a presentiment of distant events. What is, will not always remain so: the present disappears. They harbour the unexpressed hope that one day, one day in the far distant eddies of the dawning future, God will raise up those who are oppressed. But they feel it, hope it and know it in the depths of their soul, which they never reveal to their rulers and which they never could reveal. It remains for ever like the illegible book, in an unknown, untranslatable language, in which, though the words are the same, the colours of the words are different and the nuances of two thoughts have a different spectrum: prisms in which the colours are different, as if refracting the light of two different suns—rays from two different worlds. There is never the harmony that understands; the love that feels in unison never blossoms; and between them there is always the rift, the depths, the abyss, the vast distance, the wide horizon from which the mystery softly approaches, in which, as in a cloud, the hidden force bursts forth…

  So it was that Van Oudijck did not feel the mystery of visible things.

  And the divine, tranquil life could find him unprepared and weak.

  3

  NGAJIWA WAS a more cheerful place than Labuwangi: there was a garrison; administrators and clerks often came down from the interior for some fun; twice a year there were races, and the attendant festivities took up a whole week—commissioner’s reception, horse lottery, flower parade and an opera, two or three balls, which the revellers divided into a masked ball, a gala ball and a soirée dansante: a time of early rising and late retiring, of going through hundreds of guilders in a few days at cards and at the bookmaker’s… During those days the urge for pleasure and sheer enjoyment of life simply burst out. Coffee planters and sugar clerks looked forward to those days for months; people saved for six months. People poured in from all directions, into the two hotels; every family took in lodgers; people wagered with passion in a flood of champagne, the public, including the ladies, as familiar with the racehorses as if they were their personal property; quite at home at the balls, with everyone knowing each other, as if at family parties, while the waltzes and the Washington Post and Graziana were danced with the languorous grace of the Eurasian dancers of both sexes, with a swooning rhythm, trains softly billowing, a smile of calm rapture on the half-opened mouths, with that dreamy ecstasy of dance that the dancers of the Indies, men and women, express so charmingly, not least those with Javanese blood in their veins. For them, dance is not a wild sport, crude leaping around and bumping into each other with loud laughter, not the crude confusion of the lancers at young people’s balls in Holland, rather it is pure courtesy and grace, particularly among those of mixed race: a calm unfolding of elegant movement, a gracefully described arabesque of a precise step perfectly in time across the floor of club ballrooms; a harmonious blend of almost eighteenth-century youthful, noble, flowing movement, and languorous, floating steps, accompanied by the decidedly primitive booming rhythm of the Indies musicians. That was how Addy de Luce danced, with the eyes of all the women and girls fixed on him, following him, begging him with their eyes to take them with him into the undulating swell, like dreamily entering the water… That came from his mother’s side, that was an echo of the grace of royal dancers among whom his mother had lived as a child, and the mixture of modern Western and ancient Javanese gave him an irresistible attraction…

  Now, at the ball, the soirée dansante, he danced like that with Doddy and afterwards with Léonie. It was already late at night, early in the morning. Outside, the day was breaking. Exhaustion lay over the whole ballroom, and finally Van Oudijck indicated to Vermalen, the assistant commissioner with whom he and his family were staying, that he wished to leave. At that moment he was standing on the front veranda of the club, talking to Vermalen, when the prince’s assistant suddenly came straight towards him out of the shadow of the garden and, clearly upset, squatted down, made the semba and spoke: “Kanjeng! Kanjeng! Advise me, tell me what to do! The Prince is drunk and is walking about the street and has completely lost his sense of dignity.”

  The revellers made their way home. The carriages trundled up to the main entrance; their owners got in and the carriages trundled off. In the road, in front of the club, Van Oudijck saw a Javanese: his upper body bare, he had lost his turban and his long black hair waved freely about, while he gesticulated violently and talked loudly. Groups formed in the dim shadows, watching from afar.

  Van Oudijck recognized the Prince of Ngajiwa. The Prince had already behaved without self-control during the ball, after losing large sums at cards and drinking all sorts of different wines indiscriminately.

  “Hadn’t the Prince already gone home?” asked Van Oudijck.

  “Certainly, kanjeng!” wailed the prince’s assistant. I had already taken the Prince home, when I saw that he was out of control. He had already thrown himself down on his bed; I thought he was fast asleep. But as you see, he woke and got up; he left the palace and came back here. Look how he’s behaving! He’s drunk and he’s forgetting who he is and who his fathers were!”

  Van Oudijck went outside with Vermalen. He approached the Prince, who was gesticulating wildly and declaiming an incomprehensible speech.

  “Prince!” said the Commissioner. “Have you forgotten where and who you are?”

  The Prince did not recognize him. He flared up at Van Oudijck and hurled every conceivable insult at his head.

  “Prince,” said the assistant commissioner. “Don’t you know who is talking to you and whom you are talking to?”

  The Prince railed at Vermalen. His bloodshot eyes flashed fury and madness. Van Oudijck tried to help him into a carriage but he refused. Sublimely grand in his downfall he revelled in the craziness of his tragedy, and stood there as if he had burst out of himself, half-naked with waving hair. His expansive gestures were no longer coarse or bestial, but became tragic, heroic. He was wrestling with his fate on the brink of an abyss… The excess of his drunkenness seemed through some strange power to lift him out of his slow descent into bestiality, and in his drunken state he grew in stature and towered dramatically high above those Europeans. Van Oudijck looked at him stupefied. The Prince was in a tussle with the assistan
t commissioner, who pleaded with him… Along the road the population gathered, silent, appalled: the last guests left the club and the lights were dimmed. Among them were Léonie van Oudijck, Doddy and Addy de Luce. All three of them still had the weary delight of the last waltz in their eyes.

  “Addy!” said the Commissioner. “You’re on close terms with the Prince. See if he recognizes you.”