“Your nature is not made for love and mine is not made for work: not for that and nothing else. I can work for an aim that I see before me, a beautiful aim; but I can’t work ... just for work’s sake and to fill the emptiness in my life.”
“Your aim is India....”
“A fine phrase,” he said. “It may be so for a man like the resident, who has succeeded in his career and who never has to sit studying the Colonial List and calculating on the illness of this man or the death of that ... so that he may get promoted. It’s all right for a man like Van Oudijck, who, in his genuine, honest idealism, thinks that his aim is India, not because of Holland, but because of India herself, because of the native whom he, the official, protects against the tyranny of the landlords and planters. I am more cynical by nature....”
“But don’t be so lukewarm about India. It’s not merely a fine phrase: I feel like that myself. India is our whole greatness, the greatness of us Hollanders. Listen to foreigners speaking of India: they are all enchanted with her glory, with our methods of colonization.... Don’t have anything to do with the wretched Dutch spirit of our people at home, who know nothing about India, who always have a sneering word for India, who are so petty and stiff and bourgeois and narrow-minded....”
“I didn’t know that you were so enthusiastic about India. Only yesterday you were full of wretched anxieties, and I was standing up for my country....”
“Oh, it gives me a sort of shudder, the mystery in the evenings, when something seems to threaten I don’t know what! I’m afraid of the future; there’s danger ahead of us!... I feel that I, personally, am still very remote from India, though I don’t want to be; that I miss the art amid which I was educated; that I miss here, in our everyday life, the plastic beauty which both my parents always pointed out to me.... But I am not unjust. And I think that India, as our colony, is great; I think that we, in our colony, are great....”
“Formerly, perhaps it was so. Nowadays, everything is going wrong; nowadays, we are no longer great. You have an artistic nature; you are always looking for artistic perfection in India, though you seldom find it. And then your mind is confronted with that greatness, that glory. That’s the poetry of it. The prose of it is a gigantic but exhausted colony, still governed from Holland with one idea: the pursuit of gain. The reality is not an India under a great ruler, but an India under a petty, mean-souled blood-sucker; the country sucked dry; and the real population—not the Hollander, who spends his Indian money at The Hague, but the population, the native population, attached to the native soil—oppressed by the disdain of its overlord, who once improved it with his own blood, and now threatening to revolt against this oppression and disdain.... You, as an artist, feel the danger approaching, vaguely, like a cloud in the sky, in the Indian night; I see the danger as something very real, something rising—before Holland—if not from America and Japan, then out of the soil of India herself....”
She smiled:
“I like you when you talk like this,” she said. “I should end by falling in with your views.”
“If I could achieve that by talking!” he laughed, bitterly, getting up. “My half hour is over: the resident is expecting me and he doesn’t like waiting a minute. Goodbye ... and forgive me.”