Part 13 (1/2)

But Theo went on, growing confidential in his turn and telling his brother that it would be no great advantage for him even if he were acknowledged and legitimatized. And in this way they both became excited, glad to have met each other, to have grown intimate in this brief hour. And beside them walked Addie, surprised by this quick mutual attraction, but otherwise empty of thought. They had crossed a bridge and by a circuitous route had come out behind the Patjaram factory-buildings. Here Si-Oudijck said good-night, shaking hands with Theo, who slipped a couple of rix-dollars into his palm. They were accepted greedily, with a flicker of the furtive glance, but not a word of thanks. And Addie and Theo went past the factory, now silent, to the house. The family were strolling, outside, in the garden and in the tjemara-avenue. And, as the two young men approached, the golden, eight-year-old child came running towards them, the old grandmother's little foster-princess, with her fringe of hair and her whitened forehead, in her rich little, doll-like dress. She came running up to them and suddenly stopped in front of Addie and looked up at him. Addie asked her what she wanted, but the child did not answer and only looked up at him and then, putting out her little hand, stroked his hand with it. It was all so clearly the result of an irresistible magnetism in the shy child, this running up, stopping, looking up and stroking, that Addie laughed aloud and stooped and kissed her lightly. The child skipped back contentedly. And Theo, still excited by his evening, first by his conversation with Oorip and then by his explanation with Addie, his meeting with his half-brother, his own confidences about his father--Theo, feeling bitter and interesting, was so greatly irritated by this trivial behaviour of Addie and the child, that he exclaimed, almost angrily:

”Oh, you ... you'll never be anything but a woman's man!...”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Things had gone well with Van Oudijck upon the whole. Born of a simple Dutch family, with no money, he had found his youth a hard though never cruel school of precocious earnestness, of early strenuous work, of immediate looking forward to the future, to a career, to the honourable position which he hoped--with the least possible delay--to fill among his fellow-men. His years of oriental study at Delft had been just gay enough to enable him later to believe that he had once been young; and, because he had taken part in a masquerade, he even thought that he had spent quite a dissolute life, with much squandering of money and riotous living. His character was based on a good deal of quiet Dutch respectability and an earnest outlook upon life, a rather gloomy, disillusioned outlook, though intelligent and practical: he was accustomed to visualize his honourable position among his fellow-men; and his ambition had developed rhythmically and steadily into a temperate thirst for position, but only on the lines along which his eyes were always wont to gaze: the hierarchical lines of the Indian Civil Service. Things had always gone well with him. Displaying great capacity, he had been greatly valued; he had become an a.s.sistant-resident earlier than most and a resident while still young; and his ambition was now really satisfied because his authoritative office was in complete harmony with his nature, whose love of rule had progressed with its ambition. He was now really satisfied; and, though his eyes looked still much farther ahead and saw glimmering before them a seat on the Indian Council, and even the throne at Buitenzorg, he had days when, sober and contented, he declared that to become a resident of the first cla.s.s--putting aside the higher pension--had little in its favour except at Samarang and Surabaya, but that the Vorstenlanden were absolutely a burden, while Batavia occupied such a peculiar and almost derogatory position, in the thick of so many higher officials, members of council and directors. And, though his eyes thus looked farther ahead, his practical and temperate nature would have been quite satisfied if any one should have prophesied to him that he would die as Resident of Labuw.a.n.gi. He loved his district and loved India; he never yearned for Holland, nor for the pageant of European civilization, even though he himself had remained very Dutch and above all hated anything that was half-caste. This was the inconsistency in his character, for he had married his first wife, herself a half-caste, purely out of affection; and, as for his children, in whom the Indian blood was eloquent--outwardly in Doddie, inwardly in Theo, while Rene and Ricus were two thorough little Eurasians--he loved them with an intense feeling of paternity, with all the tenderness and sentiment that slumbered in the depths of his nature: a need to give much and receive much in the circle of his domestic life. Gradually this need had extended to the circle of his district: he took a paternal pride in his a.s.sistant-residents and controllers, among whom he was popular and beloved. It had happened only once in the six years during which he had been Resident of Labuw.a.n.gi that he had been unable to get on with a controller: then the man was a half-caste, and he had had him transferred: had him sacked, as he put it. And he was proud that, despite his strict discipline, despite his stern insistence on work, he was beloved by his officials. He was all the more grieved by the constant secret enmity of the regent, his ”younger brother,”

to use the Javanese t.i.tle, in whom indeed he would gladly have found a younger brother to govern his native population under himself, the elder brother. It grieved him that matters had fallen out thus; and he would then think of other regents, not only of this one's father, the fine old pangeran, but of others whom he knew: the Regent of D---, a cultivated man, speaking and writing Dutch correctly, contributing lucid Dutch articles to newspapers and magazines; the Regent of S---, a trifle frivolous and vain, but very rich and very benevolent, figuring as a dandy in European society and polite to the ladies. Why should things have fallen out just so in Labuw.a.n.gi, with this silent, spiteful, secretive, fanatical puppet, with the reputation of a saint and sorcerer, stupidly idolized by the people, in whose welfare he took no interest and who adored him only for the glamour of his ancient name, a man in whom he always felt an antagonism, never uttered in words, but plainly palpable under his icy correctness of demeanour? And then at Ngadjiwa too there was the brother, the card-player, the gambler: why should just he be so unlucky in his regents?

Van Oudijck was in a gloomy mood. He was accustomed to receiving, at regular intervals, anonymous letters, venomous libels spewed forth from quiet corners, bespattering at one time an a.s.sistant-resident, at another a controller, besmirching now the native head-men and now his own family; sometimes taking the form of a friendly warning, sometimes displaying a malicious delight in wounding; very, very anxious to open his eyes to the shortcomings of his officials and to his wife's misconduct. He was so completely used to this that he did not count the letters, reading them hastily or hardly at all and carelessly destroying them. Accustomed as he was to judging for himself, these spiteful warnings made no impression on him, though they reared their heads like hissing snakes among all the letters which the post brought him daily; and as regards his wife he was so blind, he had always been so much in the habit of picturing Leonie in the tranquillity of her smiling indifference and in the home-like sociability which she most certainly attracted round her--in the hollow void of the residency, whose chairs and ottomans seemed always arranged for a reception--that he could never have credited the most trivial of all these slanders.

He never mentioned them to her. He loved his wife; he was in love with her; and, as he always saw her almost silent in society, as she never flirted or coquetted, he never glanced into the slough of corruption that was her soul. At home, indeed, he was absolutely blind. At home he displayed that utter blindness which is often seen in men who are very capable and efficient in their business or profession; who are accustomed to scan with sharp eyes the wide perspective of their official duties, but who are near-sighted at home; who are wont to a.n.a.lyse things in the lump, but not their psychological details; whose knowledge of mankind is based on principles, and who divide mankind into types, as in the caste of an old-fas.h.i.+oned play; who can at once plumb the capacity of their subordinates, but are utterly unable to realize the intricate complex, like a tangled arabesque, like rankly-growing tendrils, of the psychic involution of those who form their own household: always gazing over their heads, failing to grasp the inner meaning of their speech, and taking no interest in the kaleidoscopic emotions of hatred and jealousy and life and love that s.h.i.+ne with prismatic hues right before their eyes. He loved his wife and he loved his children, because the feeling and the fact of paternity were necessities of his being; but he knew neither his wife nor his children. He knew nothing about Leonie; and he had never realized that Theo and Doddie had secretly remained faithful to their mother, so far away in Batavia, ruined by her unspeakable mode of life, and that they felt no love for him. He thought that they did give him their love; and, as for him ... when he thought of them, a slumbering affection awoke within him.

He received these anonymous letters daily. They had never made an impression on him; yet of late he no longer destroyed them, but read them attentively and put them aside in a secret drawer. He could not have said why. They contained accusations against his wife, they contained imputations against his daughter. They sought to intimidate him by threatening that he might be stabbed in the dark. They warned him that his spies were utterly untrustworthy. They told him that his divorced wife was suffering from poverty and hated him, they told him that he had a son whom he had left unprovided for. They stealthily grubbed up all the secret or obscure pa.s.sages in his life and his career. The thing depressed his spirits in spite of himself. It was all very vague; and he had nothing with which to reproach himself. In his own eyes and the world's, he was a good official, a good husband and a good father, he was a good man. That he should be blamed for having judged too unjustly and unfairly here, for having acted cruelly there, for having divorced his first wife, for having a son running wild in the compound; that people should throw mud at Leonie and Doddie: it all depressed him nowadays. For it was unaccountable that people should do just this. To this man, with his practical good sense, the vagueness was just the most vexatious part of it. He would not fear an open fight, but this mock battle in the dark was upsetting his nerves and his health. He could not conceive why it was happening. There was nothing to tell him. He could not conjure up the face of an enemy. And the letters came day after day; and enmity lurked daily in the shadows about him. It was too mystical and too much opposed to his nature not to embitter and depress and sadden him. Then paragraphs appeared in the lesser papers, utterances of a mean and hostile press, vague accusations or palpable falsehoods. Hatred was seething all about him. He could not fathom the reason of it, he became ill from brooding over it. And he discussed it with n.o.body and hid his suffering deep down within himself.

He did not understand it. He could not imagine why it was, why it should be so. There was no logic in it all. Logically he should be loved, not hated, however strict and authoritative he might be considered. Indeed, did he not often temper his authoritative strictness with the jovial laugh under his thick moustache, with a friendly, genial warning and exhortation? Was he not on circuit a pleasant resident, who regarded the circuit with his officials as a relaxation, as a delightful trip on horseback through the coffee-plantations, touching at the go-downs in each; as a jolly excursion, which relaxed one's muscles after all those weeks of office-work: the big staff of district heads following on their little horses, riding their skittish animals like nimble monkeys, with flags in their hands; with the native orchestra tinkling out its blithe crystal notes of welcome wherever he went; with the carefully prepared dinner in the dak-bungalow in the evening and the rubber till late at night? Had not his officials, in informal moments, told him that he was a regular sport of a resident, an indefatigable rider, jovial at meals and so young that he would actually take the scarf from the nautch-girl and dance with her for a moment, very cleverly performing the lissom ritual movements of the hands and feet and hips, instead of buying himself off with a rix-dollar and leaving her to dance with the district head? Never did he feel so happy as on circuit. And now that he was gloomy and depressed, dissatisfied, not knowing what hidden forces were opposing him in the dusk--straight, honest man that he was, a man of simple principles, a serious worker--he thought that he would go on circuit soon and, by that diversion, rid himself of the gloom that was oppressing him. He would ask Theo to go with him, for the sake of a few days' change.

He was fond of his boy, even though he considered him stupid, thoughtless, reckless, lacking in perseverance, never satisfied with his superiors, tactlessly opposing his manager, until he had once more made himself impossible in the coffee-plantation or sugar-factory at which he happened to be employed. He considered that Theo ought to make his own way, as his father had done before him, instead of relying entirely on the resident's protection. He did not hold with nepotism. He would never favour his son above any one else who had the same rights. He had often told nephews of his, keen on obtaining concessions in Labuw.a.n.gi, that he would rather have no relations in his district and that they must expect nothing from him except absolute impartiality. That was how he had got on; that was how he expected them to get on ... and Theo too. Nevertheless, he silently watched Theo, with all a father's love, with an almost sentimental tenderness; he regretted, silently but profoundly, that Theo was not more persevering and did not look more closely to his future, to his career, to an honourable situation among his fellow-men, from the standpoint of either money or position. The lad just lived from day to day, without a thought of the morrow.... Perhaps he was a little cold to Theo, outwardly: well, he would have a confidential talk with him some day, would advise him; and now, in any case, he would ask Theo to go with him on circuit.

And the thought of riding for five or six days in the pure air of the mountains, through the coffee-plantations, inspecting the irrigation-works, doing what most of all attracted him in his official duties, the thought of this relieved his soul, brightened his outlook, till he ceased to think about the letters. He was made for a plain, simple life: he found life natural, not complex and involved; his life had followed a perceptible ascent, open and gradual, looking out towards a glittering summit of ambition; and the things that teemed and swarmed in the shadow and the darkness, the things that bubbled up from the abyss: these he had never been able or anxious to see. He was blind to the life that underlies the visible life. He did not believe in it, any more than a mountaineer who has lived long on a quiescent volcano believes in the inner fire which persists in its mysterious depths and which escapes only in the form of hot steam and a sulphurous stench. He believed neither in the force above things nor in the force of things themselves. He did not believe in dumb fate nor in silent inevitability. He believed only in what he saw with his own eyes: in the harvest, in the roads, districts and villages and in the welfare of his province; he believed only in his career, which he saw before him like an ascending path. And, in the unclouded clarity of his simple, masculine nature, in the universally perceptible obviousness of his upright love of authority, his legitimate ambition and his practical sense of duty, there was only one weak point: his affection, his deep, almost effeminate, sentimental affection for the members of his domestic circle ... into whose soul he could not see, being blind and seeing only in the light of his fixed principle, seeing his wife and children as they ought to be.

Experience had taught him nothing. For he had loved his first wife also as he now loved Leonie.... He loved his wife because she was his wife, because she belonged to him, because she was the princ.i.p.al person in his circle. He loved the circle as such and not as so many individuals who formed its links. Experience had taught him nothing. His thoughts were not in accordance with the changing hues of his life; they accorded with his ideas and principles. They had made a man and a force of him and also a good official. They had also allowed him as a rule to be a good man, according to his lights. But, because he possessed so much affection, unconscious, una.n.a.lysed and merely very deeply felt, and because he did not believe in the hidden force, in the life within life, in the force that teemed and swarmed like volcanic fires under the mountains of majesty, like troubles under a throne, because he did not believe in the mysticism of tangible things, life sometimes found him weak and unprepared when, serene as the G.o.ds and more powerful than men, it deviated from what he regarded as logical.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The mysticism of concrete things in that island of mystery which is Java!... Outwardly the docile colony with the subject race, which was no match for the rude trader who, in the golden age of his republic, with the young strength of a youthful people, greedy and eager for gain, stout and phlegmatic, planted his foot and his flag on the crumbling empires, on the thrones which tottered as though the earth had been in seismic labour. But, deep in its soul, it was never subjected, though smiling in proud, contemptuous resignation and bowing submissively beneath its fate; deep in its soul, despite a cringing reverence, it lived in freedom its own mysterious life, hidden from western eyes, however these might seek to fathom the secret--as though with a philosophic intention of maintaining before all a proud and smiling tranquillity, pliantly yielding and to all appearances courteously approaching--but deep within itself divinely certain of its own views and so far removed from all its rulers'

ideals of civilization that no fraternization between master and servant will ever take place, because the difference which ferments in soul and blood remains insuperable. And the European, proud in his might, in his strength, in his civilization and his humanity, rules arrogantly, blindly, selfishly, egoistically, amidst all the intricate cog-wheels of his authority, which he slips into gear with the certainty of clockwork, controlling its every movement, till to the foreigner, the outside observer, this overlords.h.i.+p of tangible things, this colonizing of territory alien in race and mind, appears a masterpiece, a very world created.

But beneath all this show the hidden force lurks, slumbering now and unwilling to fight. Beneath all this appearance of tangible things the essence of that silent mysticism threatens, like a smouldering fire underground, like hatred and mystery in the heart. Beneath all this peace of grandeur the danger threatens and the future mutters like the subterranean thunder in the volcanoes, inaudible to human ears. And it is as though the subject race knew it and were leaving matters to the latent force of things and awaiting the divine moment that is to come if there be any truth in the calculations of the mystics. As for the native, he reads his overlord with a single penetrating glance; he sees in him the illusion of civilization and humanity and he knows that they are non-existent. While he gives him the t.i.tle of lord and the homage due to the master, he is profoundly conscious of his democratic, commercial nature and despises him for it in silence and judges him with a smile which his brother understands; and he too smiles. Never does he offend against the form of slavish servility; and, with his salaam, he acts as though he were the inferior, but he is silently aware that he is the superior. He is conscious of the hidden, unuttered force; he feels the mystery borne upon the surging winds of his mountains, in the silence of the secret, sultry nights; and he foresees events that are as yet remote. What is will not always be; the present is disappearing. Dumbly he hopes that G.o.d will lift up those who are oppressed, some time, some time in the distant advent of the dawning future. But he feels and hopes and knows it in the innermost depths of his soul, which he never unlocks to his ruler, which he would not even be able to unlock, which always remains an indecipherable book, in the unknown, untranslatable tongue in which the words indeed are the same but the shades of meaning expressed by them are different and in which the manifold hues of the two ideals show different spectra: spectra in which the colours differ as though given forth by two separate suns, rays from two separate worlds. And never is there the harmony that understands; never does that love blossom forth which is conscious of unity; and between the two there is always the gap, the chasm, the abyss, the distance, the width whence looms the mystery wherefrom, as from a cloud, the hidden force will one day flash forth....

So it was that Van Oudijck did not feel the mysticism of tangible things.

And the serene life, as of the G.o.ds, might well find him weak and unprepared....

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Ngadjiwa was a gayer place than Labuw.a.n.gi: there was a garrison; managers and employers often came down from the coffee-plantations in the interior for a few days' amus.e.m.e.nt; there were races twice a year, accompanied by festivities which filled a whole month: the reception of the resident, a horse-raffle, a battle of flowers and an opera, two or three b.a.l.l.s, distinguished by the revellers as the fancy-dress ball, the ceremonial ball and the soiree dansante; it was a time of early rising and late retiring, of losing hundreds of guilders in a few days at ecarte and in the totalizator.... The longing for pleasure and the cheery joy of life were freely indulged during those days; coffee-planters and young men from the sugar-factories looked forward to them for months ahead; people saved up for them during half the year. The two hotels were filled with guests from all directions, every household entertained its visitors; people betted furiously, while champagne flowed in torrents, all, including the ladies, knowing the race-horses as thoroughly as though they were their own property, feeling quite at home at the dances, everybody knowing everybody, as at family-parties, while the waltzes and Was.h.i.+ngton Posts and grazianas were danced with the languorous grace of the Eurasian dancers, to a swooning measure, the trains gently floating, a smile of quiet rapture on the parted lips, with that dreamy voluptuousness which the Indian settlers express so charmingly in their dances, especially those who have Javanese blood in their veins. Dancing with them is not a rough diversion, all b.u.mping against one another with rude leaps and loud laughter, not the wild whirl of the Lancers as at Dutch boy-and-girl b.a.l.l.s, but represents, especially to the Eurasians, nothing but courtesy and grace: a serene blossoming of the poetry of motion; a gracefully designed curve of precise steps to a pure measure over the club-room floors; an almost eighteenth-century harmony of youthful n.o.bility, waving and trailing and swaying in the dance, despite the primitive boom-booming of the Indian musicians. This was how Addie de Luce danced, with the eyes of every woman and girl fixed upon him, following him, imploring him with their glances to take them with him also in that waving and undulating motion; which was like a dream upon the water.... This came to him with his mother's blood, this was a survival of the grace of the dancing princesses among whom his mother had spent her childhood; and the mingling of modern European and ancient Javanese gave him an irresistible charm.

And now, at the last ball, the soiree dansante, he danced like this with Doddie and, after her, with Leonie. It was late at night, or rather early in the morning: the day was dawning outside. A fatigue hung over the ball-room; and Van Oudijck at last intimated to the a.s.sistant-resident, Vermalen, with whom he and his family were staying, that he was ready to go home. At that moment he was in the front verandah of the club, talking to Vermalen, when the native councillor suddenly ran up to him from the shadow of the garden and, suffering from obvious excitement, squatted, salaamed and said:

”Excellency! Excellency! Please advise me, tell me what to do! The regent is drunk, he is walking along the street and forgetting all his dignity.”