Part 16 (1/2)
”I shouldn't do it often, Eva, if I were you.”
”No, I think it inexplicable, and yet it's already beginning to bore me. One grows so accustomed to the incomprehensible.”
”Everything's incomprehensible.”
”Yes ... and everything's a bore.”
”Eva!” he said, with a soft, reproachful laugh.
”I give up the fight. I shall just sit in my rocking-chair ... and look at the rain.”
”There was a time when you used to see the beautiful side of my country.”
”Your country? Which you would be glad to leave to-morrow to go to the Paris Exhibition!”
”I've never seen anything.”
”How humble you are to-day!”
”I am sad, because of you.”
”Oh, please don't be that!”
”Play something more.”
”Well, then, have your gin-and-bitters. Help yourself. I shall play on my out-of-tune piano; it will sound as melodious as my soul, which is also all of a tangle....”
She went back to the middle gallery and played something from Parsifal. He remained sitting outside and listened. The rain was pouring furiously. The garden stood clean and empty. A violent thunder-clap seemed to split the world asunder. Nature was supreme; and in her gigantic manifestation the two people in that damp house were diminished, his love was nothing, her melancholy was nothing and the mystic music of the Grail was as a child's ditty to the echoing mystery of that thunder-clap, whereat fate itself seemed to sail with heavenly cymbals over these doomed creatures in the Deluge.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Van Helderen's two children, a boy and girl of six and seven, were staying at Eva's; and Van Helderen came in regularly once a day for a meal. He no longer spoke of his intense feeling, as though unwilling to disturb the pleasant intimacy of their daily intercourse. And she accepted his daily visits, was powerless to keep him at a distance. He was the only man in her immediate circle with whom she could speak and think aloud; and he was a comfort to her in these days of dejection. She did not understand how she had come to this, but she gradually lapsed into an absolute apathy, a sort of annihilating condition of thinking nothing necessary. She had never been like this before. Her nature was lively and cheerful, seeking and admiring the beautiful in poetry and music and painting, things which, from her early childhood, from her childish books, she had seen about her and felt and discussed. In India she had gradually come to lack everything of which she felt a need. In her despair she succ.u.mbed to a sort of nihilism that made her ask:
”What is the reason of anything?... Why the world and the people in it and the mountains?... Why all this tiny whirl of life?”
And then, when she read of the social movements, of the great social problems in Europe, of the Eurasian question in Java, which was becoming more and more urgent, she thought to herself:
”Why should there be a world, if man eternally remains the same, small and suffering and oppressed by all the misery of his humanity?”
She did not see the purpose of it all. Half of mankind was suffering poverty and struggling upwards out of that darkness ... to what? The other half was stagnating stupidly and dully amid its riches. Between the two was a scale of gradations, from black poverty to dismal wealth. Over them stood the rainbow of the eternal illusions, love, art, the great notes of interrogation of justice and peace and an ideal future.... She felt that it was much ado about nothing, she failed to see the purpose and she thought of herself:
”Why is it all so?... And why the world and poor humanity?”
She had never felt like this before, but there was no struggling against it. Gradually, from day to day, India was making her so, making her sick at her very soul. Frans van Helderen was her only consolation. The young controller, who had never been to Europe, who had received all his education at Batavia, who had pa.s.sed his examinations at Batavia, with his distinguished manners, his supple courtesy, his strange, enigmatic nationality, had grown dear to her in friends.h.i.+p because of his almost exotic development. She told him how she delighted in this friends.h.i.+p; and he no longer replied by offering his love. There was too much charm about their present relation. There was something ideal in it, which they both needed. In their everyday surroundings, that friends.h.i.+p shone before them like an exquisite halo of which they were both proud. He often called to see her, especially now that his wife was at Tosari; and they would walk in the evening twilight to the beacon which stood by the sea like a small Eiffel tower. These walks were much talked about, but they did not mind that. They sat down on the foundation of the beacon, looked out to sea and listened to the distance. Ghostly proas, with sails like night-birds' wings, glided into the ca.n.a.l, to the droning sing-song of the fishermen. A melancholy of resignation, of a small world and small people hovered beneath the skies filled with twinkling stars, where gleamed the mystic diamonds of the Southern Cross or the Turkish crescent of the horned moon. And above that melancholy of the droning fishermen, of crazy proas, of small people at the foot of the little light-house, drifted a fathomless immensity of the skies and the eternal stars. And from out the immensity drifted the unutterable, as it were the superhumanly divine, wherein all that was small and human sank and melted away.
”Why attach any value to life when I may die to-morrow?” thought Eva. ”Why all this confusion and turmoil of mankind, when to-morrow perhaps everything may have ceased to exist?”