“Hasn’t the regent been home yet?” asked Van Oudijck.
“Surely, excellency!” replied the councillor, plaintively. “I took the regent home as soon as I saw that he was no longer able to control himself. He flung himself on his bed; I thought he was sound asleep. But see, he woke and got up; he left the palace and came back here. See how he’s behaving! He is drunk, he is drunk and he forgets who he is and who his fathers were!”
Van Oudijck went outside with Vermalen. He walked up to the regent, who was making violent gestures and delivering an unintelligible speech in a loud voice.
“Regent!” said the resident. “Don’t you know where and who you are?”
The regent did not recognize him. He ranted at Van Oudijck, he called down all the curses of heaven upon his head.
“Regent!” said the assistant-resident. “Don’t you know who’s speaking to you and to whom you’re speaking?”
The regent swore at Vermalen. His bloodshot eyes flashed with drunken fury and madness. Assisted by the councillor, Van Oudijck and Vermalen tried to help him into a carriage; but he refused. Splendid and sublime in his fall, he gloried in the madness of his tragedy, he stood, as though some explosive force had made him beside himself, half-naked, with floating hair and great gestures of his crazy arms. He was no longer coarse and bestial but became tragic, heroic, fighting against his fate, on the edge of the abyss.... The excess of his drunkenness seemed with a strange force to raise him out of his gradual bestialization; and, fuddled as he was, he drew himself up, towering high, dramatically, above the Europeans.
Van Oudijck gazed at him in stupefaction. The regent was now coming to blows with the councillor, who addressed him in beseeching tones. On the road, the population collected, silent, dismayed; the last guests were leaving the club, where the lights were growing dim. Among them were Léonie van Oudijck, Doddie and Addie de Luce. All three still bore in their eyes the weary voluptuousness of the last waltz.
“Addie,” said the resident, “you’re an intimate friend of the regent’s. Just see if he knows you.”
The young man spoke to the tipsy madman, in soft Javanese accents. At first the regent kept on with his words of objurgation, with his gigantic, raving gestures; then, however, the softness of the language seemed to hold a well-known memory for him. He gave Addie a long look. His gestures subsided, his drunken glory evaporated. It was as though his blood suddenly understood that young man’s blood, as though their souls recognized each other. The regent nodded dolefully and began a long lament, with his arms raised on high. Addie tried to help him into a carriage, but the regent resisted and refused. Then Addie took his arm in his own with gentle force and walked on with him slowly. The regent, still lamenting, with tragic gestures of despair, suffered himself to be led. The councillor followed with one or two underlings, who had run after the regent out of the palace, helplessly. The procession vanished in the darkness.