On reaching his study, Harold Dercksz turned up the gas and dropped into his chair and stared. Life sometimes veiled things, veiled them silently, those terrible, life-long things, and then they did not threaten so greatly and, until death came and wiped them away, they passed, passed always, however slowly they might pass. But they passed away very slowly, the things. He was an old man now, a man of seventy-three, and an infirm old man, dragging his old age to the grave for which he was yearning. How many sufferings had he not endured! He could not understand why he need grow so old, while the things passed so slowly, went silently by, but with such a trailing action, as though they, the things of the past, were ghosts trailing very long veils over very long paths and as though the veils rustled over the whirling leaves that fluttered upon the paths. All his long aftermath of life he had seen the things go past and he had often failed to understand how seeing them go past like that was not too much for a man's brain. But the things had dragged their veils and the leaves had just rustled: never had the threat been realized; no one had stepped from behind a tree; the path had remained desolate under his eyes; and the path wound on and on and the ghostly things went past.... Sometimes they looked round, with ghostly eyes; sometimes they went on again, with dragging slowness: they were never brought to a standstill. He had seen them pass silently through his childhood, through his boyhood, when he was the age of Pol and Gus; he had seen them pass through his very commonplace life as a coffee-planter in Java and a manufacturer afterwards and through his married life with a woman whose existence he had come to share by mistake, even as she had come by mistake to share his: he, doubtless, because he did nothing but see those things, the things that passed.... He now coughed, a hard, dry cough, which hurt his chest and stomach and sent jolts shooting through his shrunken legs....
Oh, how much longer would it last, his seeing the things?... They went past, they went past and loitered and loitered.... Oh, why did they not go faster?... From the time when he was a little fellow of thirteen, a merry, sportive little fellow playing barefoot in the river before the assistant-resident's house, rejoicing in the fruit, the birds, the animals, rejoicing in all the glad child-life of a boy in Java who can play in big grounds, beside running waters, and climb up tall, red-blossoming trees; from the moment—a sultry night, the dark sky first threatening and then shedding heavy, clattering torrents of rain—from the moment when he saw the things, the first things, the first terrible Thing: from that moment a confusion had crept over his tender brain like a monster which had not exactly crushed the child, but which had ever since possessed it, held it in its claws.... All the years of his life, he had seen the Thing rise up again, like a vision, the terrible Thing begotten and born in that night when, being no doubt a little feverish, he had been unable to sleep under the heavy, leaden night, which still held up the rain in powerful sails that could not burst and allowed no air through for him to breathe. The vision? No, the Thing, the actual Thing ...
A lonely pasangrahan[5] in the mountains: he is there alone with his two parents, he the darling of his father, who is taking his sick-leave. The other brothers and the sisters have been left behind in the town, in the assistant-resident's house.
He cannot sleep and he calls:
"Baboe, come here!..."
She does not answer. Where is she? As a rule, she lies outside his door, on her little mat, and wakes at once.
"Baboe, baboe, come here!"
He becomes impatient; he is a big boy, but he is frightened, because he has a touch of fever too, like Papa, and because the night is so sultry, as though an earthquake were at hand.
"Baboe!..."