The Hidden Force (4 page)

V
AN OUDIJCK
, in a good mood because of the presence of his wife and children, was keen to go for a drive, and horses were hitched to the landau. He looked out with a jovial, amiable expression from beneath the wide gold braid of his cap. Beside him, Léonie was wearing a new mauve muslin dress, from Batavia, and a hat trimmed with mauve poppies. In the provinces a woman’s hat is a luxury, a mark of elegance, and Doddy, seated opposite her, hatless in provincial style, was silently annoyed and felt that Mama might have told her that she was going to “use” a hat. Now she looked so drab beside Mama, she couldn’t stand those smiling poppies! Only René had accompanied them, in a clean white suit. The head attendant sat on the box next to the coachman and held against his hip the large gold parasol, a symbol of authority. It was past six and already growing dark. It was at this time of day that a velvety silence, that tragic mystery of the twilit atmosphere of east monsoon days, settled over everything. The occasional bark of a dog or the coo of a wood pigeon was all that broke the unreal silence, like in a ghost town. But the carriage rattled right through it, and the horses trampled the silence to shreds. They encountered no other carriages,
the absence of any sign of human life casting a spell over the gardens and verandas. A few young men were strolling about and raised their hats. The carriage had left the main avenues and entered the Chinese quarter, where the lights were being lit in the little shops. Business was more or less over: the Chinese were resting, their legs stretched out in front of them, or crossed one over the other in a general air of inactivity. When the carriage approached they got up and remained standing respectfully. The Javanese—those who had been well brought-up and had manners—crouched down. At the roadside, lit by small paraffin lamps, was a line of portable kitchens, harbouring drink vendors and pastry sellers. Countless little lights glowed in the evening dusk, grubby and garish, revealing the Chinese stalls crammed with merchandise, a jumble of red and gold characters and plastered with red and gold labels with inscriptions on them; at the back was the family altar with the sacred print of the white god, seated, and behind him the leering black god.

Suddenly the road widened and became more respectable. Houses of wealthy Chinese loomed gently out of the darkness. Especially striking was the palatial white villa of a wealthy former opium dealer who had made his fortune in the days before opium regulation, a shining palace of elegant stucco with countless outbuildings, the gates of the front veranda in a monumental Chinese style, grandly elegant in muted gold tones. At the back of the open house stood the huge family altar, the print of the gods resplendent in light, amid a mannered garden laid out with winding paths, exquisitely
filled pots and tall flower vases glazed dark blue-green and containing precious dwarf plants. All this had passed from father to son—and all was kept in a state of sparkling tidiness, with a well-tended neatness of detail: the prosperous,
spotlessly
clean luxury of a Chinese opium millionaire. But not all the Chinese houses were so ostentatiously visible, most lay hidden in gardens behind high walls, shut off, retreating into their secretive family life. Suddenly the houses petered out and the wide road became lined with Chinese graves, opulent tombs. A grass mound with a bricked entrance—the entrance to death—was raised up in the symbolic shape of the female organ—the gateway to life. An ample lawn surrounded it (to the great annoyance of Van Oudijck, who calculated how much agricultural land had been lost to the graves of these rich Chinese). The Chinese seemed to triumph in life and death in the town that was otherwise so quiet and mysterious. It was the Chinese who gave it its real character of hectic coming and going, trade, making fortunes, living and dying. When the carriage entered the Arab quarter—ordinary houses, but gloomy, lacking style, fortune and human
existence
, hidden behind thick doors; at one, true, there were chairs on the front veranda, but the man of the house
squatted
gloomily on the ground, motionless, following the carriage with his black eyes—this part of town seemed even more
tragically
mysterious than the distinguished parts of Labuwangi, and the ineffable mystery seemed to billow out like an aspect of Islam across the whole town, as if it were Islam that spread a dark cloud of the fatal melancholy of resignation in the
trembling, soundless evening… They could feel it in their trundling carriage, having been used to that atmosphere since childhood and no longer sensitive to the sombre mystery that was like the approach of a black power, which from the start had breathed over them—the unsuspecting rulers with their Creole blood. Perhaps when Van Oudijck occasionally read in the newspapers about pan-Islamism, he caught a whiff, or the black power, the sombre mystery, opened to his innermost thoughts. But like now, out for a drive with his wife and children in the rattling carriage—the clip-clop of his fine Australian horses, the attendant with the closed parasol that glittered like a cluster of sun’s rays—he felt too much himself, with his ruler’s and conqueror’s nature, to have any inkling of the black mystery or catch any glimpse of the black peril. And more especially because he felt too much at ease to sense or see anything melancholy. In his optimism he did not even see the decline of his town, which he loved; he did not notice, as they drove on, the huge colonnaded villas that bore witness to the former wealth of planters—abandoned, neglected, in overgrown grounds; one of them occupied by a lumber company that had allowed its foreman to occupy the house and pile planks in the front garden. The deserted houses loomed sad and white, their pillared porticoes casting shapes that gleamed eerily in the moonlight, like temples of doom… But seated in their carriage, enjoying the gentle rocking motion, they did not see it like that: Léonie dozed and smiled, and Doddy, now they were approaching Long Avenue once more, had her eyes peeled looking for Addy…

O
NNO ELDERSMA
, the secretary, was busy. Every day the post brought an average of several hundred letters and documents to the commissioner’s office, which employed two senior clerks, numerous native scribes and office assistants, and the commissioner complained as soon as they fell behind with their work. He himself worked hard and he demanded the same of his staff. But sometimes they were deluged with documents, claims and applications. Eldersma was a typical civil servant, completely wrapped up in his administrative work and always busy. He worked morning, noon and night. He didn’t take a siesta. He ate a quick dish of rice at four in the afternoon, and had a brief rest. Fortunately he had a sound, strong, Frisian constitution, but he needed all his energy and his nerves for his work. It wasn’t just scribbling, red tape—it was pencraft, muscular work, nervous work, and it went on and on. He was burning up, wearing himself out as he wrote. He no longer had any other ideas, he was nothing but a civil servant, a bureaucrat. He had a charming house, the sweetest, most exceptional wife, a charming child, but he never saw them. He lived only vaguely in his home surroundings. He just worked, conscientiously, finishing what
he could. Sometimes he told the commissioner that he could not possibly do any more. But on this point Van Oudijck was inexorable, pitiless. He had been district secretary himself, and knew what it meant. It meant work, it meant plodding along like a carthorse. It meant living, eating and sleeping with pen in hand. Then Van Oudijck would show him this and that piece of work that had to be finished, and Eldersma, who had said that he could do no more than he was doing, would finish the work, and so always did a little more than he thought he could.

Then his wife, Eva, would say: my husband isn’t human any more—he’s a civil servant. The young wife, very European, who had never before been in the Indies and who been in Labuwangi for a year or so, had never known that one could work as hard as her husband did in a place as hot as Labuwangi was in the east monsoon. At first she had fought against it, and had tried to assert her rights over him, but when she saw that he really hadn’t a minute to spare, she waived those rights. She had immediately
realized
that her husband would not share her life, nor she his, not because he was not a good husband who was very fond of his wife, but simply because the mail brought two hundred documents daily. She had seen at once that in Labuwangi—where there was nothing—she would have to console herself with her house and, later, her child. She arranged her house as a temple to art and home comforts, and racked her brains over her little boy’s education. A highly cultured woman, she came from an artistic background.
Her father was Van Hove, a well-known landscape painter, and her mother, Stella Couberg, a famous concert singer. Eva had grown up in a home filled with art and music, which she had absorbed from an early age from children’s books and nursery rhymes, then she had married an East Indies civil servant and accompanied him to Labuwangi. She loved her husband, a strapping Frisian fellow, with enough education to have wide interests. She had gone with him to the Indies, happy in her love and full of illusions about the Eastern mystery of the tropics. She had tried to hold on to her illusions, despite many warnings. In Singapore she had been struck by the bronze sculptured bodies of the naked Malays and the multi-coloured orientalism of the Chinese and Arab quarters, the chrysanthemum-scented poetry of the Japanese tea-houses she passed… But very soon, in Batavia, grey disillusionment drizzled down over her expectations of seeing beautiful sights everywhere in the Indies, like in a fairy tale out of the
Arabian Nights
. The routine of petty, ordinary, everyday life dampened all her enthusiasm to admire, and she suddenly saw all that was ridiculous, even before she could see any beauty. The men in pyjama bottoms and loose jackets stretched out on their reclining chairs, their legs stretched out on the extended slats, their feet—although very well cared for—bare, and the toes moving in an easy-going game of big and little toes, even as she passed… Or the ladies in sarongs and loose jackets—the only practical morning wear, which can be quickly changed two or three times before noon, but which suits so few people; the sarong, with its straight fall at
the back is particularly angular and ugly, however elegant and expensive the garment. The banality of the houses with all their whitewash and tar and ugly rows of flowerpots; the parched, scorched look of nature, the filthiness of the natives… All those little absurdities in European colonial life: the accents punctuated with exclamations, the provincial airs and graces of the civil servants—the members of the Council of the Indies being the only ones entitled to wear a top hat; the strictly observed points of etiquette, such as when the senior official was first to leave a reception, and the others waited their turn… And the little tropical idiosyncrasies, such as the use of wooden Devoe-paint crates and paraffin tins for every conceivable purpose: the wood for shop windows, dustbins and home-made furniture; the tins for gutters, watering cans and every kind of domestic utensil… The young, highly cultured young woman, with her fantasies of the
Arabian Nights
, not distinguishing in these first impressions between colonialism—the ways of the European who settles in a country alien to his blood—and what was truly poetic and belonged genuinely to the Indies, was authentically Eastern, purely Javanese—the young woman, because of all these absurdities and many others besides, had immediately felt disappointed, as anyone with an artistic bent does in the colonial Indies, which are not at all poetic or artistic, and where people carefully pile as much horse manure as possible around the roses in white pots as a fertilizer, so that when a breeze gets up the scent of roses mingles with the stench of freshly watered manure. And she was unjust, as were all
new Dutch arrivals, towards the beautiful country that they wished to see according to their preconceived notion of colonialism. And she forgot that the country itself, originally so beautiful, was not to blame for that absurdity.

She had experienced several years of this and had been amazed, sometimes alarmed and sometimes shocked,
sometimes
amused and sometimes irritated, and had finally, with her reasonable nature and the practical reverse side to her artistic sensibility, grown used to it all. She had grown used to the game with the toes, to the manure round the roses; she had grown used to her husband, who was no longer a human being or a husband, but a civil servant. She had suffered greatly, had written desperate letters, had been dreadfully homesick for her parents’ house, and had been on the point of leaving—but had not gone through with it, not wanting to abandon her husband, and so she had accustomed herself to her life, had come to terms with it. Eva was a woman who besides having the soul of an artist—she was an exceptional pianist—had a courageous heart. She was still in love with her husband and knew that despite everything she managed to provide him with a comfortable home. She gave much serious thought to her child’s education. And once she had accustomed herself, she became less unjust and suddenly saw much of the beauty of the Indies. She appreciated the stately grace of a coconut palm; the exquisite, heavenly flavour of the local fruits; the splendour of the trees in blossom; and in the interior she had discovered the noble grandeur of nature, the harmony of the rolling hills, the fairy-tale groves of giant
ferns, the menacing ravines of the craters, the gleaming terraces of the wet paddy fields and the tender green of the young rice plants. And the Javanese character had been like an artistic revelation to her with its elegance, its grace, its formalized greetings, its dance, its distinguished aristocracy, often so clearly descended from a noble line, from generations of nobles, and modernizing until it acquired diplomatic
flexibility
, with a natural worship of authority, and fatalistically resigned beneath the yoke of the rulers whose gold braid awakens its innate respect.

In her parental home, Eva had always been surrounded by the cult of art and beauty, indeed, to the point of decadence; those around her, whether in an outward environment of
aesthetic
perfection, in beautiful words or in music, had always directed her towards life’s graceful contours, perhaps too exclusively. And now she was too well trained in this
aestheticism
to remain stuck in her disappointment and see nothing but the whitewash and tar of the houses, the petty quirks of officialdom, the paint crates and the horse manure. Her
literary
imagination now saw the palatial quality of the houses and the humorous side to official pomposity, which was almost inevitable. As she saw all those details more precisely, her view of the world of the Indies widened, until it became revelation upon revelation. Except that she continued to feel something strange, something she could not analyse, something
mysterious
, a dark secret whose soft approach she felt at night… But she thought it was just the atmosphere created by the darkness and the very dense foliage, like very faint music from very
strange stringed instruments, the distant rustling sound of a harp in a minor key, a vague warning voice… A noise in the night, that was all, which gave rise to poetic fantasies.

In Labuwangi—a small, provincial centre—she often shocked her more provincial countrymen with her air of excitement, her enthusiasm, her spontaneity, her
joie de vivre
(even in the Indies) and joy in the beauty of life. Her instincts were healthy, though gently tempered and blurred by a charming affectation of wanting only what was beautiful: the line of beauty, the beautiful colour, artistic notions. Those who knew her felt either antipathy or extreme
sympathy
: few people were indifferent to her. In the Indies she had gained a reputation for being out of the ordinary: her house, her clothes, her child’s upbringing, her ideas were all out of the ordinary; the only ordinary thing about her was her Frisian husband, who was almost too ordinary for those surroundings, which seemed to have been cut out of an art magazine. Being a sociable person, she gathered around her as many members as possible of the European community, to which—though the community was seldom artistic—she brought an appealing tone that reminded them all of Holland. This tightly knit group admired her and naturally followed the tone she set. She was dominant because of her superior education, without being dominant by nature. Not everyone approved of this, and her critics called her eccentric, but the tightly knit group remained loyal to her, inspired by her amid the languor of Indies life to savour concerts, ideas, all that made life worth living.

For example, she had around her the doctor and his wife, the senior engineer and his wife, the district controller and his wife, and sometimes, from outside, a few controllers and a few young clerks from the sugar factories. It was quite a lively circle of people, with whom she called the tune, put on plays, organized picnics, and whom she enchanted with her house, her dresses and her Epicurean artistic flair. They forgave her everything they could not understand—her aesthetic credo, her love of Wagner’s music—because she offered them merriment, a little
joie de vivre
and conviviality amid the deadly colonial tedium. For that they were deeply grateful to her. And in this way her house had become the real centre of the social life of Labuwangi, while the district commissioner’s mansion opposite withdrew grandly into the shade of its banyan trees. Léonie van Oudijck was not jealous. She liked to be left in peace and was only too happy to give control to Eva Eldersma. And so Léonie had no part in anything: music or amateur dramatic societies, or charitable work. She delegated all the social duties that the wife of a district commissioner normally undertakes, to Eva. Léonie had her reception once a month, spoke to everyone, smiled at everyone and at New Year gave her annual ball. That was the extent of social life in the commissioner’s mansion. For the rest she lived for herself, in the comfort that she had
selfishly
created around her, in her pink fantasy of cherubs and whatever love she could find. At intervals she felt the need for Batavia and went there for a few months. And so, as the wife of the district commissioner, she went her own way, while Eva
did everything, and set the tone. There were sometimes petty jealousies, for example between her and the wife of the
inspector
of finances, who felt it was she and not the secretary’s wife who should take second place after Mrs Van Oudijck. This led to squabbling over colonial civil service etiquette, and to stories and gossip that circulated, blown up out of all proportion, in the remotest sugar factories in the district. Eva paid no attention to the rumours, preferring to inject some life into Labuwangi, and to that worthy end, she and her club took charge. She had been elected district president of the Thalia amateur dramatic society, and had accepted, provided the rules were abolished. She was prepared to be queen, but without a constitution. The general consensus was that this was impossible: there had always been a rule book. But Eva insisted that she did not wish to be president if there were rules. In that case, she simply preferred to act. They gave in: the rules of Thalia were abolished and Eva had absolute power to choose the plays and cast the productions. The company flourished—under her direction the standard of acting was so high that people came from Surabaya to attend performances at the Concordia club. The plays performed were of a quality never before seen in Concordia.

This made her very popular in some quarters and very unpopular in others. But she pressed on and provided some European culture, to avoid gathering too much colonial “mould” in Labuwangi. And people went to great lengths to secure an invitation to her dinners, which were famed and notorious, since she demanded that the gentlemen came in
evening dress and not in their Singapore jackets with no shirts underneath. She stipulated white tie and tails and would not budge. The ladies wore low-cut gowns as usual, to keep cool, and were delighted. But their partners protested and, on the first occasion, were all choking in their stiff collars and gasping for breath. The doctor maintained it was unhealthy; colonial veterans maintained it was absurd and contrary to all good old Indies customs…