The Hidden Force (11 page)

T
HE 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 with 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.

N
GAJIWA 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 assistant 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.”

The young man spoke to the drunken madman in soft Javanese. At first the Prince went on cursing, and his crazy gestures became huge; but then he seemed to recognize in the softness of the language a familiar memory. He looked at Addy for a long time. His gestures subsided, his glorification of drunkenness petered out. It was suddenly as if his blood understood the blood of the young man, as if their souls were communicating. The Prince nodded gloomily and began to wail, at length, with his arms raised. Addy tried to help him into his carriage, but the Prince resisted: he did not want to go. Then Addy took his arm gently but firmly, and slowly walked off with him. The Prince, still wailing with a tragic, despairing gesture, let himself be led away. The Prince’s assistant followed with a few retainers, who had trailed the Prince from the palace, helplessly… The procession vanished into the darkness.

Léonie, with a smile, got into the assistant commissioner’s carriage. She remembered the argument over cards at Pajaram; she enjoyed watching such a slow, public decline, an obvious undermining through passion, uncontrolled by any tact or correct moderation. As far as she was concerned, she felt stronger than ever, because she enjoyed her passions and controlled and made them the slaves of her pleasure… She despised the Prince and it gave her a Romantic
satisfaction
, a literary frisson, to catch a glimpse of the successive phases of that downfall. In the carriage she looked at her husband who sat there gloomily. His gloominess delighted her, because she thought him sentimental in his support of
the Javanese aristocracy. A sentimental official instruction, which Van Oudijck interpreted even more sentimentally. And she revelled in his sorrow. Then she looked at Doddy and glimpsed in her stepchild’s eyes, tired with dancing, jealousy at that very, very last waltz of hers with Addy, and she was delighted at that jealousy. She felt happy, because sorrow had no hold over her, nor did passion. She played with the elements of life and they slid off her and left her just as unmoved and calmly smiling and unwrinkled and milky-white as ever.

Van Oudijck did not go to bed. His head on fire, raging sorrow in his heart, he immediately took a bath, put on his pyjama bottoms and a jacket and ordered coffee to be brought to him on the veranda outside his room. It was six o’clock, and there was a wonderful, cool, morning freshness in the air. But he was in such a bad mood that his temples were throbbing as if congested, his heart was pounding and his nerves were trembling. He could still see the scene at dawn in his mind’s eye, flickering like a silent film, full of teeming changes in attitude. What upset him most of all was the impossibility of the incident, the illogicality, the inconceivability. That a high-born Javanese, despite all the noble tradition in his veins, could behave as the Prince of Ngajiwa had that night, had never seemed possible to him, and he would never have believed it if he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. For this man of predetermined logic, this truth was simply as monstrous as a nightmare. Highly susceptible to surprises that he did not consider logical, he was angry at reality. He wondered
whether he himself had not been dreaming, or drunk. The fact that the scandal had taken place infuriated him, but now that things were as they were, well, he would recommend that the Prince be dismissed… There was nothing else for it.

He got dressed, talked to Vermalen and then went with him to the Prince’s palace; they both forced their way into the Prince’s presence, notwithstanding the vacillation of the retainers, notwithstanding the breach of etiquette. They didn’t see the Prince’s wife, the
radèn-ayu
, but found the Prince in his bedroom. He was lying on the bed with his eyes open, coming round in a melancholy mood, but not yet sufficiently himself to understand fully the oddness of the visit, with the Commissioner and the assistant commissioner at his bedside. Although he recognized them, he did not speak. While the two officials each tried to make him see how extremely improper his behaviour had been, he stared at them brazenly and persisted in his silence. It was so strange that they looked at each other and wondered whether the Prince had not perhaps gone insane and whether he was responsible for his actions. He had not spoken a word so far, and still refused to speak. When Van Oudijck threatened him with dismissal, he remained silent, staring shamelessly into the Commissioner’s eyes. He did not part his lips, but maintained his complete silence. There was the slightest suggestion of irony around his mouth. The officials, convinced that the Prince was mad, shrugged their shoulders and left the room.

On the veranda they met the
radèn-ayu
, a small
downtrodden
woman like a beaten dog, a slave girl. She approached
them in tears and asked, begged, for forgiveness. Van Oudijck told her that the Prince was still refusing to speak. No matter what he had threatened him with, the Prince had inexplicably but clearly deliberately refused to speak,. The
radèn-ayu
then whispered that the Prince had consulted a native healer, who had given him a talisman and assured him that if he persisted in complete silence, his enemy would not be able to gain a hold over him. Anxiously she begged for help and forgiveness, gathering her children around her. After
summoning
the Prince’s assistant and charging him with guarding the Prince as far as possible, the officials left. Although Van Oudijck had often had to deal with Javanese superstition, it still infuriated him, contradicting as it did what he called the laws of nature and life. Yes, only superstition could lead the Javanese to stray from the true path of their innate courtesy. Whatever representation they made to him now, the Prince would remain tight-lipped, persisting in his total silence that the native healer had imposed on him. In this way he imagined himself safe from all those he considered his enemies. This preconceived notion of enmity with someone Van Oudijck would have liked to regard as a younger brother and co-administrator was what upset him most of all.

He returned to Labuwangi with Léonie and Doddy. Back home he felt a momentary pleasure at being in his own house again, a delight in his own domesticity that he had always found soothing: the material pleasure of being in his own bed, with his own desk and chairs, drinking his own coffee,
prepared
the way he liked it. Those small consolations restored
his good humour for a second, but he immediately felt all his old bitterness returning when under a pile of letters on his desk he recognized the tortuous handwriting of a couple of shadowy letter-writers. Mechanically he opened the first and was disgusted to find Léonie’s name linked with that of Theo. Nothing was sacred to those wretches: they invented the most monstrous combinations, the most unnatural slanders, and the most gruesome allegations up to and including incest. All the mud that was slung at his wife and son raised them to an even greater height and purity in his love, to a peak of inviolability, and he loved them both with an even greater and more fervent tenderness. But all his churning bitterness brought back his ill humour in full force. It was based on reality, since he had to recommend the Prince of Ngajiwa for dismissal, and was reluctant to do so. Yet this unavoidable necessity soured his whole existence, and made him nervous and ill. When he could not follow the course that he set out, when life deviated from the events predetermined a priori by himself—Van Oudijck—this recalcitrance, this revolt by life, made him nervous and ill. After the death of the old
pangéran
he had simply resolved to raise up the floundering dynasty of the Adiningrats, both in loving memory of the exemplary Javanese prince and because of his mandate as a
commissioner
, and out of a feeling of humanity and hidden poetry in himself. And he had never been able. From the outset he had been thwarted—unconsciously, through the power of things—by the old
radèn-ayu pangéran
, who lost everything at cards, gambled everything away and ruined herself and
her family. He had censured her as a friend. She was not unreceptive to his advice but her passion had proved stronger. Van Oudijck had immediately judged her son, Sunario, the Prince of Labuwangi, even before his father’s death, as unfit for the actual post of prince: pettily proud of his noble blood, insignificant, never informed about real life, without any talent for government or concern for the ordinary people, extremely fanatical, always consorting with native healers and with sacred calculations, always withdrawn and living in a dream of obscure mysticism, and blind to what might bring prosperity and justice to his Javanese subjects. And yet the population worshipped him, both because of his nobility and because of his reputation for holiness and far-reaching powers: a divine magical power. Secretly the women of the palace sold the water that had flowed over his body when he bathed, bottled as a medicine, a cure for various afflictions. That was what the elder brother was like, and this morning the younger had lost all control of himself, obsessed by the craving for gambling and drink… With these sons, the dynasty—once so brilliant—was tottering to its downfall: their children were young, some cousins were assistant princes in Labuwangi in neighbouring districts, but not one drop of noble blood flowed in their veins. No, he, Van Oudijck, had never been able to do what he wanted. The people whose interests he was defending were themselves fighting against him. They had no future.