The Hidden Force: A Story of Modern Java

by Louis Couperus

Léonie, wearily smiling, stepped into the assistant-resident’s carriage. She remembered the gambling-quarrel at Patjaram; she took pleasure in observing the gradual deterioration which was occurring so visibly, this visible degradation by a passion controlled by neither tact nor moderation. And where she was concerned she felt stronger than ever, because she enjoyed her passions and controlled them and made them the slaves of her enjoyment.... She despised the regent; and it gave her a romantic satisfaction, an artistic pleasure, to watch the successive phases of that deterioration. In the carriage she glanced at her husband, who sat in gloomy silence. And his gloom delighted her, because she thought him sentimental, with his championing of the Javanese nobility, the result of a sentimental instruction, which Van Oudijck took even more sentimentally. And she delighted in his sorrow. And from her husband she glanced at Doddie, detecting in the dance-weary eyes of her step-daughter a jealousy due to that last, that very last waltz of Léonie’s with Addie. And she rejoiced in this jealousy. She felt happy, because sorrow had no hold upon her, any more than passion. She played with the things of life and they glided off her and left her as unperturbed and calmly smiling and unwrinkled and creamy white as before.

Van Oudijck did not go to bed. With his head aflame, with a fury of mortification in his heart, he at once took a bath, dressed himself in pyjamas and had coffee served on the verandah outside his room. It was six o’clock; the air was steeped in a delightful coolness of morning freshness. But he suffered from so fierce an anger that his temples throbbed as though with congestion, his heart thumped in his chest, his every nerve quivered. The scene of that night and morning was still flickering before his eyes, ticking on like a cinematograph, with whirling changes of posture. What angered him above all was the impossibility of it all, the illogicality, the unthinkableness of it. That a Javanese of high birth, forgetful of all the noble traditions in his blood, should have been able to behave as the Regent of Ngadjiwa had behaved that night would never have seemed to him possible. He would never have believed it, if he had not seen it with his own eyes. To this man of predetermined logic the fact was simply monstrous, like a nightmare. Extremely susceptible to surprise, which he did not consider logical, he was angry with reality. He wondered whether he had not been dreaming, whether he himself had not been drunk. That the scandal should have occurred made him furious. But, as it was so, well, he would recommend the regent for dismissal. There was no alternative.

He dressed, spoke to Vermalen and went to the palace with him. They both forced their way in to the regent, notwithstanding the hesitation of the retainers, notwithstanding the breach of etiquette. They did not see the wife, the raden-aju. But they found the regent in his bedroom. He was lying on his bed, with his eyes open, recovering gloomily, not yet sufficiently restored to life fully to realize the strangeness of this visit, of the presence of the resident and assistant-resident by his bedside. He recognized them nevertheless, but did not speak. While the two of them tried to bring home to him the gross impropriety of his behaviour, he stared shamelessly in their faces and persisted in his silence. It was all so strange that the two officials looked at each other and exchanged glances to ask whether the regent was not mad, whether he was really responsible. He had not spoken a single word, he remained silent. Though Van Oudijck threatened him with dismissal, he remained dumb, staring with shameless eyes into the resident’s eyes. He did not open his lips, he maintained the attitude of a deaf-mute. At the most, an ironical smile formed about his lips. The officials, really thinking that the regent was mad, shrugged their shoulders and left the room.

In the gallery they met the raden-aju, a short, downtrodden little woman, like a whipped dog, a beaten slave. She approached, weeping; she begged, she implored for forgiveness. Van Oudijck told her that the regent refused to speak, for all his threats, that he was silent with an inexplicable but obviously deliberate silence. Then the raden-aju whispered that the regent had consulted a native physician, who had given him a talisman and assured him that, if he only persisted in maintaining complete silence, his enemies would obtain no hold upon him. Terrified, she implored for help, for forgiveness, gathering her children round her as she spoke. After sending for the councillor and enjoining him to keep a strict watch on the regent, the two officials went away.

Often though Van Oudijck had encountered the superstition of the Javanese, it always enraged him, as opposed to what he called the laws of nature and life. Yes, nothing but his superstition could induce a Javanese to depart from the correct path of his innate courtliness. Whatever they might now wish to put before him, the regent would remain silent, would persist in the absolute silence prescribed by the physician. In this way he believed himself protected against those whom he considered his enemies. And this preconceived notion of hostility in one whom he would so gladly have regarded as his younger brother and fellow-ruler was what disturbed Van Oudijck most of all.

He returned to Labuwangi with Léonie and Doddie. Once at home, he felt for a moment the pleasantness of being back in his own house, an enjoyment of domesticity that always soothed him greatly: the material pleasure of seeing his own bed again, his own writing-table and chair, of drinking his own coffee, made as he was accustomed to have it. These minor amenities put him in a good humour for a little while, but he at once felt all his bitterness awaken when he perceived, under a pile of letters on his desk, the disguised handwritings of a couple of furtive correspondents. Automatically he opened these first and felt sick when he read Léonie’s name coupled with that of Theo. Nothing was sacred to those scoundrels: they concocted the most monstrous calumnies, the most unnatural libels, the most loathsome imputations, down to that of what was almost incest. All the filth flung at his wife and son only set them higher in his love, girt them with a greater purity, placed them on an inviolable summit and made him cherish them with a deeper and more fervent affection. But his bitterness, once stirred up, brought back all his mortification. Its actual cause was that he had to propose the Regent of Ngadjiwa’s dismissal and did not enjoy the prospect. But this one necessity embittered his whole being, upset his nerves and made him ill. If he could not follow the path which he had determined upon, if life strayed from the possibilities which he, Van Oudijck, had a priori fixed, this reluctance, this rebellion upset his nerves and made him ill.

He had once and for all resolved, after the death of the old pangéran, to raise up the declining race of the Adiningrats, alike because of his affectionate memory of that excellent Javanese prince, because of his instructions as resident and because of a sense of lofty humanity and hidden poetry in himself. And he had never been able to do so, he had at once been thwarted—unconsciously, by force of circumstances—by the old raden-aju pangéran, who gambled away everything, who was ruining herself and her kin. As a friend he had exhorted her. She had always been accessible to his advice, but her passion had proved too strong for her. Van Oudijck had from the first, even before the father’s death, judged her son, Sunario, the Regent of Labuwangi, unfitted for the actual position of regent. The fellow was petty and insignificant, insufferably proud of his descent, never in touch with the actualities of life, devoid of any talent for ruling or any consideration for his inferiors, a great fanatic, always occupied with native doctors, with sacred calculations, with talismans, always reticent and living in a dream of obscure mysticism and blind to what would spell welfare and justice for his Javanese subjects. And the population adored him nevertheless, both because of his noble birth and because he was reputed to possess sanctity and a far-reaching power, a divine magic. Silently, secretly, the women of the Kabupaten sold bottles of the water that had flowed over his body in the bath, as a healing remedy for various diseases. There you had the elder brother; and the younger had quite forgotten himself last night, frenzied by cards and drink. In these two sons the once so brilliant race was tottering to its fall. Their children were young; a few cousins were native councillors in Labuwangi and the adjoining residencies, but their veins contained not a drop of the noble blood. No, Van Oudijck had always failed, glad though he would have been to succeed. The very men whose interests he defended were opposing his efforts. Their day was over. But why this must be so he could not understand; and it all upset him and embittered him.

And he had pictured to himself a very different path, a beautiful ascending path, even as he saw his own life before him, whereas with them the path of life wound tortuously downwards. And he did not understand what it was that was stronger than he when he put forth his will. Had it not always happened in his life and his career that the things for which he had fervently wished came to pass with the logic which he himself, day after day, had attributed to the things that were about to take place? His ambition had now established the logic of the ascending path, for his ambition had established as its aim the revival of this Javanese family....

Would he fail? To fail in striving for an aim which he had set himself as an official: he would never forgive himself! Hitherto he had always succeeded in achieving what he had willed. But what he now wanted to achieve was, unknown to himself, not merely an official aim, a part of his work. What he now wanted to achieve was an aim the idea of which sprang from his humanity, from the noblest part of himself. What he now wanted to achieve was an ideal, the ideal of the European in the east and of the European who sees the east as he wishes to see it and as he could but see it.

And that there were forces that gathered into one force, which threatened him, mocking at his proposals, laughing at his ideals, and which was all the stronger through lying more deeply hidden: this he would never admit. It was not in him to acknowledge them; and even the clearest revelation of them would be a riddle to his soul and would remain a myth.