The Hidden Force (22 page)

“They’re very shy, the little monkeys,” he said. They’re Lena’s sisters and the woman you’ve seen is her mother.”

He paused for a moment, quite simply, as though she would realize who Lena was: the very young woman with a gold blush on her cheeks and jet-black eyes, whom she had seen in a flash.

“And then there are young brothers, who have to go to school in Garut. You see, that’s my family now. When I met Lena, I took responsibility for the whole family. It costs me a lot of money, because I have my first wife in Batavia, my second in Paris, and René and Ricus in Holland. That all
costs money, and here there’s my new “family”. But at least I
have
a family… It’s all very Indies, you may say: an informal Indies marriage with the daughter of a coffee-plantation foreman, and on top of that the old woman and little
brothers
and sisters. But I’m doing some good. These people were penniless and I’m helping them, and Lena is a sweet child, the consolation of my old age. I can’t live without a woman, and so it happened more or less by itself… And it’s fine like this: I vegetate here and drink good coffee and they look after the old man very well…”

He fell silent, and then continued: “And you… you’re going to Europe? Poor Eldersma, I hope he’ll soon recover… It’s all my fault, isn’t it? I made him work far too hard. But that’s how it is in the Indies, dear lady. We all work hard here, until we stop working. And you’re leaving… in just a week? How happy you’ll be to see your parents and listen to beautiful music. I’m still grateful to you. You did a lot for us, you were the poetry in Labuwangi. The poor Indies… how people curse them. The country can’t help the fact that we barbarians invaded it, conquerors whose only wish was to grow rich and then be off… And if they don’t get rich… they curse: the heat that God bestowed on it from the outset… the lack of sustenance for the soul and the mind… the soul and mind of the barbarian. The poor country that has been cursed so much will probably think: if only you’d stayed away! And you… you didn’t like the Indies.”

“I tried to grasp their poetry, and now and then I succeeded. Apart from that… everything is my fault, Commissioner, and
not the fault of this beautiful country. And like your
barbarian
… I should not have come here. All the depression, all the melancholy I suffered here in this beautiful land of mystery… is my fault. I’m not cursing the Indies, Commissioner.”

He took her hand, moved almost to tears by what she had said.

“Thank you for that,” he said softly. “Those words are yours: your own words, the words of an intelligent, cultured woman—not like a stupid Dutchman who lashes out because he has not found here exactly what corresponded to his ideal. I know your nature suffered greatly here. That’s inevitable. But… it was not the fault of the country.”

“It was my own fault, Commissioner,” she repeated, with her soft voice and smile.

He thought she was adorable. The fact that she did not burst into imprecations or break into exalted language because she was leaving Java in a few days, was a tonic to him. And when she got up and said that it was time she should be going, he felt a deep melancholy.

“And so I’ll never see you again?”

“I don’t think we’ll be coming back.”

“So it’s goodbye for ever?”

“Perhaps we’ll see you again, in Europe…”

He waved his hand dismissively.

“I’m deeply grateful that you came to pay the old man a visit. I’ll drive back to Garut with you…”

He called inside, where the women were hiding out of sight, and where the little sisters were giggling, and he got into the
carriage with her. They drove down the avenue of ferns and suddenly they saw the sacred lake of Lellès, overshadowed by the vertiginous circling of the constantly gliding bats.

“Commissioner,” she said. “I feel it here…”

He smiled.

“They’re just bats,” he said.

“But in Labuwangi… it might have been just a rat…”

He frowned for a moment. Then he smiled again—the jovial line appeared around his broad moustache—and he looked up with curiosity.

“Hmm,” he said softly. “Really? You feel it here?”

“Yes.”

“No, I don’t… It’s different with everyone.”

The giant bats gave a shrill despairing call of triumph. The carriage drove on, and passed a small railway halt. In the normally deserted landscape it was strange to see a whole population of motley Sundanese flocking around the small station, eagerly awaiting a slow train that was approaching among the bamboos, belching black smoke. All their eyes were staring crazily as if they were expecting salvation from the first glimpse, as though the first impression they received would be a spiritual treasure.

“That’s a train bringing
hajis
,” said Van Oudijck. “All newly returned from Mecca.”

The train stopped, and from the long third-class carriages, solemnly, slowly, full of piety and aware of their worth, the pilgrims alighted, heads in rich yellow and white turbans, eyes gleaming proudly, lips pressed together superciliously,
in shiny new jackets, golden-yellow and purple cloaks, which fell in stately folds almost to their feet. Buzzing with rapture, sometimes with a mounting cry of suppressed ecstasy, the throng pressed closer and stormed the exits of the long carriages… The pilgrims alighted solemnly. Their brothers and friends vied with each other in grabbing their hands, the hems of their golden-yellow and purple cloaks, and kissed their sacred hands, their holy garment, because it brought them something from holy Mecca. They fought and jostled around the pilgrims to be the first one to kiss them. And the pilgrims, contemptuous and self-confident, seemed not to see the struggle, and were superior, calm, solemn and dignified amid the fighting, amid the surging and buzzing throng, and surrendered their hands to them, surrendered the hems of their tunics to the fanatical kiss of anyone who came near.

It was strange in this country of deeply secret slumbering mystery, to see arising in this Javanese people—who as always cloaked themselves in the mystery of their impenetrable soul—an ecstatic passion, repressed and yet visible, to see the fixed stares of drunken fanaticism, to see part of their impenetrable soul revealing itself in their adulation of those who had seen the tomb of the Prophet, to hear the soft throb of religious rapture, to hear a shrill, sudden, unexpected, irrepressible cry of glory, which immediately died away, melted into the buzz, as if frightened of itself, since the sacred moment had not yet arrived…

On the road behind the station Van Oudijck and Eva, making slow progress because of the bustling crowd—which
was still surrounding the pilgrims with its buzz, respectfully carrying their luggage, obsequiously offering their carts—suddenly looked at each other, and though neither of them wanted to put it into words, they said it to each other with a look of understanding, that they both felt it—both of them, simul taneously, there amid that fanatical throng—felt It, That.

They both felt it, the ineffable: what is hidden in the ground, what hisses beneath the volcanoes, what wafts in on the distant winds, what rushes in with the rain, what rumbles in with the deeply rolling thunder, what floats in from the wide horizon over the endless sea, what looks out from the black secret eye of the inscrutable native, what creeps into his heart and squats in his humble respect, what gnaws like a poison and an enmity at the body, soul and life of the European, what silently resists the conqueror and wears him down and makes him languish and die, if not immediately die a tragic death: they both felt it, the Ineffable…

In feeling it, together with the melancholy of their
impending
farewell, they did not see among the swaying, surging, buzzing throng that pushed along, apparently respectfully, the yellow and purple dignitaries—the pilgrims returning from Mecca—they did not see one large white figure rise above the throng and leer at the man who, however he had lived his life in Java, had been weaker than That…

Pasuruan—Batavia

October 1899—February 1900

The first English translation of Couperus's novel appeared in London in 1922 and was followed by an American edition in 1924. The translator was Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (1865–1921), a naturalized Englishman of Dutch
extraction
, who knew the author and translated several of his best-known works.

In 1985, for the scholarly Library of the Indies series published by the University of Massachusetts Press, the editor, E.M. Beekman, produced a revised, extensively annotated version. Most of Teixeira's text is retained on the grounds of its “congruence of tone with the original” (p. 40), but a number of slips are corrected, the confusing British Raj-linked terms of address “sahib” and “memsahib” are abandoned and a number of suppressed, sexually explicit passages restored. A full glossary of Malay terms is
provided
. Readers requiring a fuller historical, political and ethnic background to the story are referred to Beekman's very useful edition. However, for all its many virtues this is a compromise translation, in which the language of 1900 occasionally jars with contemporary (American) idiom, while the plethora of Malay terms slows today's reader down,
without, in my view adding greatly to the immediacy or impact of the narrative.

In this translation I have chosen not to annotate, but to explain terms in the body of the text on first occurrence. Two important Dutch official titles have been paraphrased: “resident” (potentially misleading in English) as “(district) commissioner”, and “regent”, denoting a hereditary Javanese noble employed by the colonial authorities to assist the
commissioner
, as “prince”. For the sake of consistency, “Eurasian” is used throughout to refer to mixed-race individuals, and “Creole” to designate those of European ancestry brought up and resident in the Indies. Current Indonesian
spelling
has been used throughout for Malay words, titles and place names. Historical geographical names associated with Dutch colonial rule, like Batavia and Buitenzorg, have been retained in preference to their modern equivalents, Jakarta and Kota Bogor, respectively.

The Dutch text used is that of the critical reading edition in volume 17 of K. Reijnders et al., eds,
Louis Couperus. Volledige Werken
, 50 vols (Utrecht/Antwerp: Veen, 1987–96).

P.V.

In 1900, when
The Hidden Force
was first published, Holland ruled the Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. In 1899, the sultans of Aceh had been defeated and the whole island of Sumatra brought under Dutch rule. The smaller islands, such as Lombok, the Moluccas and the Lesser Sunda Islands, were subjugated in the 1880s and 1890s. And Java already had been colonized for some time before that.

As it turned out, complete Dutch control over its Asian colony was only to last for about fifty years. But of course nobody could have known that in 1900. To the Dutch
governors
, planters, businessmen, administrators, police officers, scholars, geographers, soldiers, bankers, travellers, railway engineers, schoolteachers, and their wives, 1900 must have felt like the best of times.

It was also just then, at the very peak of Dutch
colonial
power, that an idea of nationhood began to emerge among native intellectuals. A Javanese feminist, Radèn-ayeng Kartini, advocated education for women. And, in 1908, her friend Dr Sudara founded the Budi Utomo, the first nationalist association, inspired by the example of Mahatma Gandhi. National independence was not their immediate
aim. They wanted a bigger say in the way they were
governed
. And there was growing sympathy for this view in the Netherlands. The “liberal” policy, which meant the liberty of Dutch planters to exploit the colonies as they saw fit, was replaced by the “ethical” policy, which took a fuller account of native interests. But full independence would only come after the Second World War, during which the Japanese shook the foundations of European rule by showing the white imperialist, so to speak, without clothes.

In fact, the Europeans always were vulnerable. Colonial rule, in Indonesia as well as, say, India, had to be based to some extent on bluff; the idea of European supremacy had to seem natural, and for it to appear that way the Europeans themselves, as much as the native populations under their control, had to believe it to be so. As soon as the colonialists lost faith in their natural right to rule—a loss which Nirad C. Chaudhuri, speaking of the British in India, once memorably characterized as “funk”—the colonial edifice, built over time, often haphazardly, would begin to rot, slowly, at first imperceptibly, but relentlessly, until the whole thing came toppling down. Perhaps it is so with all authoritarian systems. Loss of nerve was certainly a factor in the collapse of the Soviet empire. So perhaps Mountbatten and Gorbachev had something in common.

But in the Dutch East Indies in 1900, I suspect, only a sensitive novelist, passing through, would have been able to pick up the smell of decay, or, at any rate, to put that smell into words. Louis Couperus was such a novelist. And
The Hidden Force
, written during a year-long stay in the East Indies, is one of the masterpieces to come from the colonial experience. It is still regarded in the Netherlands as a great book. Couperus was very famous in Britain and the US as well, during his lifetime: fifteen of his books were translated; Katherine Mansfield and Oscar Wilde were among his admirers. But he has been largely forgotten outside Holland. I don’t know why. Couperus’s precious, elaborate, sometimes quite bizarre prose seems less dated in English than in the original Dutch. The reason may be that the Dutch language has changed far more than English has since 1900.

The Hidden Force
is a story of decay, fear and disillusion. It takes place in Labuwangi, an imaginary region of Java. The writer’s vision of Dutch colonialism is that of a solid Dutch house, slowly crumbling in hostile, alien soil. The Dutch characters—even Van Oudijck, the chief local administrator, or district commissioner, of Labuwangi, initially so “
practical
, cool-headed, decisive from the long-term exercise of authority”—are defeated by the hidden forces of the land they rule. The nature of these hidden, or silent, forces is indistinct. It is not quite black magic, associated with Javanese mysticism, although that plays a part. Couperus, a Romantic of his time, believed in supernatural forces. He is quoted in E.M. Beekman’s illuminating introduction to his edition (see Translator’s Note): “I believe that benevolent and hostile forces float around us, right through our ordinary, everyday existence; I believe that the Oriental, no matter where he
comes from, can command more power over these forces than the Westerner who is absorbed by his sobriety, business and making money.”

One character in the novel who commands such power (but power over little else) is Prince Sunario, the native aristocrat whose family had ruled the region for
centuries
. Van Oudijck detests him. Sunario is the heir to a long line of local sultans. The Dutch administration kept these nobles on as vassal rulers with colourful
ceremonial
trappings, and some administrative duties, such as tax-collecting. Van Oudijck, an “ethical” administrator, respected Sunario’s father, a Javanese of the old school, but sees Sunario as “degenerate, a demented Javanese dandy”, a “mystery, that
wayang
shadow puppet”, gambling and indulging in native hocus-pocus. Sunario, for his part, views the Dutchman as a crude, base, foreign infidel, who has no business upsetting the sacred bonds and privileges of ancient aristocratic rule.

Couperus, in this book at least, is in no way an apologist for colonial rule. Quite the contrary. His descriptions of Van Oudijck’s priggish love of order, hard facts and hard work, and the same man’s patronizing view of natives and contempt for half-castes, so typical of Dutch colonial administrators, are full of mocking irony. Van Oudijck’s disdain for the Eurasians is not always personal. His first wife had Javanese blood, and he loves his two children, even though his daughter, Doddy, looks and speaks like a typical Indo-European. It was the idea of the “Indo” that Van Oudijck cannot abide—the idea of
something less than pure. Van Helderen, a Creole born in the Indies, warns the Dutch wife of a civil servant that the native population, “oppressed by a disdainful overlord”, is likely to revolt at some point. He sounds remarkably prophetic. She, Eva Eldersma—a bored, artistic Dutch woman trapped in the colonial life—had sensed something foreboding in the air. She thinks it is the strangeness of the landscape, the climate, the people, whom she doesn’t understand. And he says to her: “You, being an artist, feel the danger approaching, vaguely, like a cloud, in the air, in the tropical night; I see a very real danger arising—for Holland—if not from America and Japan, then from the soil of this land itself.”

There is no doubt that Couperus felt the danger on his travels through Java. And remember, this was written when Dutch power was unassailable. But Couperus was not a prophet. So a vague sense of unease, of something being out of kilter, must have been palpable. There must have been a feeling, among at least some of the Dutch, of walking on treacherous ground, which could suck you in, however sturdy your big Dutch boots might be. To describe this feeling as guilt would be wrong and anachronistic. It might have been closer to a sense that the Europeans had bitten off more than they could chew, or a nagging awareness of the hollowness

of their bluff. Van Oudijck resists such feelings until near the end of the book, when he, too, is defeated by the silent forces of the East, forces manipulated, perhaps, by his opponent, the
puppet-like
Sunario. The struggle between the two men is a struggle
between two types of power: one is supposedly rational, open, bureaucratic; the other is magical, shadowy, mysterious. The hidden force of Sunario is associated with the night, with moonlight, while the power of the District Commissioner is exercised mainly in daylight. As Beekman points out in his introduction, the District Commssioner’s ceremonial sunshade, or
pajong
, is often described as a “furled sun”.

One is reminded of V.S. Naipaul’s descriptions of Trinidad, where the black plantation slaves would turn the world upside down at night. Then, hidden by the dark, they would call up half-forgotten remnants of African magic to transform their abject existence as slaves into a glorious parallel world of kings and queens. Naipaul describes this as a pathetic fantasy, and Couperus writes about the hidden force as something quite real. But both writers, like Conrad, are sensitive to the horror that lies behind it.

The conflict between Van Oudijck and Sunario comes to a head when the behaviour of Sunario’s brother becomes impossible. He gambles and drinks, and instead of efficiently carrying on his tax-collecting and other duties, steals money from the treasury to pay his debts. The District Commissioner decides to take the unprecedented step of dismissing him, which would mean a frightful loss of face for an ancient noble family. The Prince’s mother, a princess, is so outraged that she throws herself at the District Commissioner’s feet and offers to be his slave, if he could only forgive her son. But Van Oudijck stands firm. He cannot afford to compromise. Principle is principle. A decision, once taken, must not be
revoked. For he “was a man with a lucid, logical, simple, male sense of duty, a man of the clear, simple life. He would never know the forces lurking beneath the simple life and together constituting the almighty silent force. He would have scoffed at the suggestion that there are peoples who have more control of that force than Westerners.”

Then horrible things start to happen. The District Commissioner’s young wife, Léonie, as promiscuous as she is narcissistic, finds herself being spat on with blood-red
sirih
(betel juice), apparently from nowhere, as she stands naked in her bath. (Couperus’s description of slimy splatters
dribbling
down her breasts, her belly and her buttocks shocked his Dutch readers; in the original English translation such passages were bowdlerized.) Malevolent spirits stalk the district commissioner’s mansion. Stones sail through the rooms. Sinister figures in white turbans appear and
disappear
, like ghosts. Glasses shatter, whisky turns yellow. The District Commissioner’s family leaves the haunted mansion in terror. Even his servants flee from the house. But the District Commissioner stays put, working on his papers, ignoring the noises, the broken glass, the soiled beds, the hammering overhead. He has these disturbing events investigated, “as punctiliously as he would have done in a criminal case, and nothing came to light”.

The District Commissioner and the Prince come to a kind of agreement in the end—what agreement, the reader never knows—and the torments stop, but, like Dutch supremacy itself, the District Commissioner’s authority begins
to disintegrate even as it reaches its peak. And, again as was the case with the Dutch colonialists, the subversion, the fatal loss of nerve, occurs inside the ruler’s own heart.

Van Oudijck had ignored his wife’s sexual adventures, even though everyone else knew about them. He had been blind to her affairs with his half-caste son—her stepson—and with a handsome Eurasian boy called Addy, even though regular hate mail pointed these things out to him. He had not been aware of the jealousies that soured the air in his residency. But, now, suddenly, after he had resisted the hidden forces through sheer force of will, the tropical poison began to sap his spirit too. For the first time in his life the District Commissioner felt the pangs of hatred and jealousy and he became superstitious, too, “believing in a hidden force, hidden he knew not where, in the Indies, in the soil of the Indies, in a deep mystery, somewhere, somewhere—a force that meant him no good, because he was a European, a ruler, a stranger on this mysterious, sacred shore”. The moonlit Javanese night had exacted its revenge.

The Hidden Force
opens an interesting and fresh angle on the idea of Orientalism. For Couperus made use of all the symbols that became the clichés of East and West, which Edward Said has identified with colonial apologetics: the East representing the passive female principle (the moon), and the West the vitality of the sun; the West being modern, rational, logical, industrious, creative, idealistic, and the East mysterious, mystical, torpid, sensual, irrational. And so on. But far from using these images of Occident and Orient to
justify colonialism, Couperus shows the futility of European rule. For the hidden force of the East will vanquish the West, with all its rational pretensions.

More than that,
The Hidden Force
suggests that it is desirable that the East should do so. Van Oudijck’s spiritual defeat is also a small triumph of enlightenment. He loses the attributes that made him into the perfect Dutch administrator, to be sure. Where he had been stern and decisive before, “now he developed a tendency to pour oil in troubled waters, to make excuses, no longer to be so unbending and severe, and to blur and tone down everything that was black and white”. His vitality is gone. His skin turns sallow. In short, he shows the danger-signs of giving in to the torpor of the East, of “going native”. This happens, quite literally, at the end of the book, when Eva Eldersma, the artistic Dutch woman, goes to say goodbye to him before leaving for Europe—she, too, has been defeated; she will never come back. She finds Van Oudijck living in a native village, or
kampong
, in a situation that is “all very Indies”. He has found a kind of happiness there, living with a native woman and her extended family. He has lost his principles, but he has gained an insight, for his principles no longer blind him to reality. He has accepted the Indies for what it is.

The European dread of going native, which Couperus describes so beautifully, was a fear on two fronts: a political and a sexual one. Both are, of course, linked. We laugh now at the image of Englishmen and Dutchmen in the jungle or the bush, dressing up for formal dinners in the tropical heat. But
there was a real purpose to this. For the stiff suit was one of the necessary caste marks to impress their subjects, as well as themselves, of the Europeans’ natural right to rule. Letting go of European proprieties, or “principles”, was a step towards letting go of power. In colonial households (Eva Eldersma’s for instance), it “was always a battle, not to go under in the temptation to let yourself go, to let the grounds that were too big become overgrown…” When Eva’s husband is too hot and tired to dress for dinner in a black jacket and stiff collar, she “found it dreadful, unspeakably awful…”