“Why should there be a world, if man eternally remains the same, small and suffering and oppressed by all the misery of his humanity?”
She did not see the purpose of it all. Half of mankind was suffering poverty and struggling upwards out of that darkness ... to what? The other half was stagnating stupidly and dully amid its riches. Between the two was a scale of gradations, from black poverty to dismal wealth. Over them stood the rainbow of the eternal illusions, love, art, the great notes of interrogation of justice and peace and an ideal future.... She felt that it was much ado about nothing, she failed to see the purpose and she thought of herself:
“Why is it all so?... And why the world and poor humanity?”
She had never felt like this before, but there was no struggling against it. Gradually, from day to day, India was making her so, making her sick at her very soul. Frans van Helderen was her only consolation. The young controller, who had never been to Europe, who had received all his education at Batavia, who had passed his examinations at Batavia, with his distinguished manners, his supple courtesy, his strange, enigmatic nationality, had grown dear to her in friendship because of his almost exotic development. She told him how she delighted in this friendship; and he no longer replied by offering his love. There was too much charm about their present relation. There was something ideal in it, which they both needed. In their everyday surroundings, that friendship shone before them like an exquisite halo of which they were both proud. He often called to see her, especially now that his wife was at Tosari; and they would walk in the evening twilight to the beacon which stood by the sea like a small Eiffel tower. These walks were much talked about, but they did not mind that. They sat down on the foundation of the beacon, looked out to sea and listened to the distance. Ghostly proas, with sails like night-birds’ wings, glided into the canal, to the droning sing-song of the fishermen. A melancholy of resignation, of a small world and small people hovered beneath the skies filled with twinkling stars, where gleamed the mystic diamonds of the Southern Cross or the Turkish crescent of the horned moon. And above that melancholy of the droning fishermen, of crazy proas, of small people at the foot of the little light-house, drifted a fathomless immensity of the skies and the eternal stars. And from out the immensity drifted the unutterable, as it were the superhumanly divine, wherein all that was small and human sank and melted away.
“Why attach any value to life when I may die to-morrow?” thought Eva. “Why all this confusion and turmoil of mankind, when to-morrow perhaps everything may have ceased to exist?”
And she put the question to him. He replied that each of us was not living for himself and the present age, but for all mankind and for the future. But she gave a bitter laugh, shrugged her shoulders, thought him commonplace. And she thought herself commonplace, to think such things that had so often been thought before. But still, notwithstanding her self-criticism, she continued under the obsession of the uselessness of life, when everything might be dead to-morrow. And an humiliating littleness, as of atoms, overcame them, both of them, as they sat gazing into the spaciousness of the skies and the eternal stars.
Yet they loved those moments, which were everything in their lives; for, when they did not feel their pettiness too keenly, they spoke of books, music, painting and the big, important things of life. And they felt that, in spite of the circulating library and the Italian opera at Surabaya, they were no longer in touch with the world. They felt the great, important things to be very far from them. And both of them now became seized with a nostalgia for Europe, a longing to feel so very small no longer. They would both have liked to get away, to go to Europe. But neither of them was able. Their petty, daily life held them captive. Then, as though spontaneously, in mutual harmony, they spoke of what was soul and being and all the mystery thereof.
All the mystery. They felt it in the sea, in the sky; but they also quietly sought it in the rapping leg of a table. They did not understand how a soul or spirit could reveal itself through a table on which they earnestly laid their hands and which through their magnetic fluid was transformed from dead to living matter. But, when they laid their hands upon it, the table lived and they were forced to believe. The letters which they counted out were often confused, according to some strange alphabet; and the table, as though directed by a mocking spirit, constantly showed a tendency to tease and confuse, to stop suddenly or to be coarse and indecent. Sometimes they read books on spiritualism and did not know whether to believe or not.
These were quiet days of quiet monotony in the little town swept by the rustling rain. Their life in common seemed unreal, like a dream that rose through the rain like a mist. And it was like a sudden awakening for Eva when, one afternoon, walking outside in the damp avenue waiting for Van Helderen, she saw Van Oudijck coming in her direction.
“I was just on my way to you!” he cried, excitedly. “I was just coming to ask a favour. Will you help me once more?”