The Hidden Force: A Story of Modern Java

by Louis Couperus

Van Oudijck, in a pleasant mood because of his wife and children, suggested a drive; and the horses were put to the landau. Van Oudijck had a pleased and jovial look, under the broad, gold-laced peak of his cap. Léonie, seated beside him, was wearing a new mauve muslin frock, from Batavia, and a hat with mauve poppies. A lady’s hat in the up-country districts is a luxury, a colossal elegance; and Doddie, facing her, but dressed inland fashion, without a hat, was secretly vexed and thought that mamma might just as well have told her she was going to “take” a hat, to use Doddie’s idiom. She now looked such a contrast to mamma; she couldn’t stand them now, those softly swaying poppies. Of the boys, René was with them, in a clean white suit. The chief messenger sat on the box beside the coachman, holding against his side the great golden umbrella, the symbol of authority. It was past six, it was already growing dark; and over Labuwangi there hung at this hour the velvety silence, the tragic mystery of the twilit atmosphere that marked the days of the eastern monsoon. Sometimes a dog barked, or a wood-pigeon cooed, breaking the unreality of the silence, as of a deserted town. But now there was also the rattle of the carriage driving right through the silence; and the horses stamped the silence into tiny shreds. No other carriages were met; an absence of all signs of human life cast a spell upon the gardens and verandahs. A couple of young men on foot, in white, took off their hats.

The carriage had left the wealthier part of the town and entered the Chinese quarter, where the lights were burning in the little shops. Business was almost finished: the Chinamen were resting, in all sorts of limp attitudes, with their legs dangling or crossed, their arms round their heads, their pigtails loose or twisted around their skulls. When the carriage approached, they rose and remained standing respectfully. The Javanese for the most part—those who were well brought up and knew their manners—squatted. Along the road stood the little portable kitchens, lit by small paraffin lamps, of the drink-vendors and pastry-sellers. The motley colours showed dingy in the evening darkness, lit by innumerable little lamps. The Chinese shops, crammed with goods, displayed red and gold signboards and red and gold placards with inscriptions; in the background was the domestic altar with the sacred print; the white god seated, with the black god grimacing behind him. But the street widened, became suddenly more considerable: rich Chinese houses loomed white in the dusk; the most striking was the gleaming, palatial villa of an immensely wealthy retired opium-factor, who had made his money in the days before the opium monopoly: a gleaming palace of graceful stucco-work with numberless outbuildings. The porticos of the verandah were in a monumental style of imposing elegance and in many soft shades of gold; in the depth of the open house the immense domestic altar was visible, with the print of the gods conspicuously illuminated; the garden was laid out with conventional winding paths, but beautifully filled with square pots and tall vases of dark blue-and-green glazed porcelain, containing dwarf trees, handed down as heirlooms from father to son; and all was kept with a radiant cleanliness, a careful neatness of detail, eloquent of the prosperous, spick-and-span luxury of a Chinese opium-millionaire. But not all the Chinese houses were so ostentatiously open: most of them lay hidden with closed doors in high-walled gardens, tucked away in the secrecy of their domestic life.

But suddenly the houses came to an end and Chinese graves stretched along a broad road, rich graves, each grassy mound with a stone entrance—the door of death—raised in the form of the symbol of fecundity—the door of life—and all surrounded with a wide space of turf, to the great vexation of Van Oudijck, who reckoned out how much ground was lost to cultivation by these burial-places of the wealthy Chinese. And the Chinese seemed to triumph in life and death in this mysterious town which was otherwise so silent; the Chinese gave it its real character of busy traffic, of trade, of money-making, of living and dying; for, when the carriage drove into the Arab quarter—a district of ordinary houses, but gloomy, lacking in style, with life and prosperity hidden away behind closed doors; with chairs in the verandah, but the master of the house gloomily sitting cross-legged on the floor, following the carriage with a black look—this quarter seemed even more mysterious than the fashionable part of Labuwangi and seemed to radiate its unutterable mystery like an atmosphere of Islam that spread over the whole town, as though it were Islam that had poured forth the dusky, fatal melancholy of resignation which filled the shuddering, noiseless evening.... They did not feel this in their rattling carriage, accustomed to that atmosphere as they were from childhood and no longer sensitive to the gloomy secret that was like the approach of a dark force which had always breathed upon them, the foreign rulers with their creole blood, so that they should never suspect it. Perhaps, when Van Oudijck now and again read about Pan-Islam in the newspapers, he was dimly conscious in his deepest thoughts of this dark force, this gloomy secret. But at moments like the present—driving with his wife and children, amidst the rattling of his carriage and the trampling of his fine Walers; the messenger with the furled umbrella, which glittered like a furled sun, on the box—he was too intensely aware of his individuality, his authoritative, overbearing nature, to feel anything of the dark secret, to divine anything of the black peril. And he was now in far too pleasant a mood to feel or see anything melancholy. In his optimism he did not see even the decline of his town, which he loved; he was not struck, as they drove past, by the immense porticoed villas, the witnesses to the prosperity of former planters, now deserted, neglected, standing in grounds that had run wild, one of them taken over by a timber-felling company, which allowed the foreman to live in it and stacked the logs in the front-garden. The deserted houses gleamed sadly with their pillared porticos, which, amid the desolate grounds, loomed spectral in the moonlight, like temples of evil. But they did not see it like that: enjoying the rocking of the smooth carriage-springs, Léonie smiled and dozed; and Doddie, now that they were approaching the Lange Laan again, looked out to see whether she could catch sight of Addie....

Chapter Seven

The secretary, Onno Eldersma, was a busy man. The post brought a daily average of some two hundred letters and documents to the residency-office, which employed two senior clerks, six juniors and a number of native writers and clerks; and the resident grumbled whenever the work fell into arrears. He himself was an energetic worker; and he expected his subordinates to show the same spirit. But sometimes there was a perfect torrent of documents, claims and applications. Eldersma was the typical government official, wholly wrapped up in his minutes and reports; and Eldersma was always busy. He worked morning, noon and night. He allowed himself no siesta. He took a hurried lunch at four o’clock and then rested for a little. Fortunately he had a sound, robust, Frisian constitution; but he needed all his blood, all his muscles, all his nerves for his work. It was not mere scribbling, mere fumbling with papers: it was manual labour with the pen, muscular work, nervous work; and it never ceased. He consumed himself, he spent himself, he was always writing. He had not another idea left in his head; he was nothing but the official, the civil servant. He had a charming house, a most charming and exceptional wife, a delightful child, but he never saw them, though he lived, vaguely, amid his home surroundings. He just slaved away, conscientiously, working off what he could. Sometimes he would tell the resident that it was impossible for him to do any more. But on this point Van Oudijck was inexorable, pitiless. He himself had been a district secretary; he knew what it meant. It meant work, it meant plodding like a cart-horse. It meant living, eating, sleeping with your pen in your hand. Then Van Oudijck would show him this or that piece of work which had to be finished. And Eldersma, who had said that he could do no more than he was doing, somehow got it done, and therefore always did do something more than he believed that he could do.

Then his wife, Eva, would say:

“My husband has ceased to be a human being; my husband has ceased to be a man; my husband is an official.”

The young wife, very European, now in India for the first time, had never known, before her two years at Labuwangi, that it was possible to work as hard as her husband did, in a country as hot as Labuwangi was during the eastern moonson. She had resisted it at first; she had at first tried to stand upon her rights; but once she saw that he really had not a minute to spare, she waived them. She had very soon come to realize that her husband could not share her life, nor could she share his: not because he was not a good husband and very fond of his wife, but simply because the post brought two hundred letters and documents daily. She had soon seen that there was nothing for her to do at Labuwangi and that she would have to console herself with her house and, later, with her child. She arranged her house as a temple of art and comfort and racked her brains over the education of her little boy. She was an artistically cultivated woman and came from an artistic environment. Her father was Van Hove, the great landscape-painter; her mother was Stella Couberg, the famous concert-singer. Eva, brought up in an artistic and musical home whose atmosphere she had breathed since her babyhood, in her picture-books and childish songs, Eva had married an East-Indian civil servant and had accompanied him to Labuwangi. She loved her husband, a good-looking Frisian and a man of sufficient culture to take an interest in many subjects. And she had gone, happy in her love and filled with illusions about India and all the Orientalism of the tropics. And she had tried to preserve her illusions, despite the warnings which she had received. At Singapore she was struck by the colour of the naked Malays, like that of a bronze statue, by the Eastern motley of the Chinese and Arab quarters and the poetry of the Japanese tea-houses, which unfolded like a page of Loti as she drove past. But, soon after, in Batavia, a grey disappointment had fallen like a cold, drizzling rain upon her expectation of seeing everything in India as a beautiful fairy-tale, a story out of the Arabian Nights. The habits of their narrow, everyday existence damped all her unsophisticated longing to admire; and she saw everything that was ridiculous even before she discovered anything else that was beautiful. At her hotel, the men in pyjamas lay at full length in their deck-chairs, with their lazy legs on the extended leg-rests, their feet—although carefully tended—bare and their toes moving quietly in a conscientious exercise of big toe and little toe, even while she was passing. The ladies were in sarong and kabaai, the only practical morning-dress, which is easily changed two or three times a day, but which suits so few, the straight, pillow-case outline at the back being peculiarly angular and ugly, however elegant and expensive the costume.... And then the commonplace aspect of the houses, with all their whitewash and their rows of fragile and meretricious flower-pots; the parched barrenness of the vegetation, the dirt of the natives! And, in the life of the Europeans, all the minor absurdities: the half-caste accent, with the constant little exclamations; the narrow provincial conventionality of the officials: only the Indian Council allowed to wear top-hats. And then the rigorous little maxims of etiquette: at a reception, the highest functionary is the first to leave; the others follow in due order. And the little peculiarities of tropical customs, such as the use of packing-cases and paraffin-tins for this, that and the other purpose: the wood for shop-windows, for dust-bins and home-made articles of furniture; the tins for gutters and watering-cans and all kinds of domestic utensils....

The young and cultured little woman, with her Arabian Nights illusions, was unable, amid these first impressions, to distinguish between what was colonial—the expedients of a European acclimatizing himself in a country which is alien to his blood—and what was really poetic, genuinely Indian, purely eastern, absolutely Javanese; and, because of these and other little absurdities, she had at once felt disappointed, as every one with artistic inclinations feels disappointed in colonial India, which is not at all artistic or poetic and in which the rose-trees in their white pots are conscientiously manured with horse-droppings as high as they will bear, so that, when a breeze springs up, the scent of the roses mingles with a stench of freshly-sprinkled manure. And she had grown unjust, as does every Hollander, every newcomer to the beautiful country which he would like to see with the eyes of his preconceived literary vision, but which impresses him at first by its absurd colonial side. And she forgot that the country itself, which was originally so absolutely beautiful, was not to blame for all this absurdity.