The Hidden Force: A Story of Modern Java

by Louis Couperus

Chapter Twenty-Four

The subscription-lists went round. The plays were rehearsed and performed in three weeks’ time; and the committee handed the resident a sum of nearly fifteen hundred guilders for Mother Staats. Her debts were paid; a little house was rented for her; and she was set up in a small milliner’s shop, which Eva stocked from Paris. All the ladies in Labuwangi gave Mother Staats an order; and in less than a month not only was the woman saved from utter ruin, but her mode of life was established, her children were going to school again and she was enjoying a pleasant livelihood. All this had happened so swiftly and unostentatiously; the subscriptions were so munificent; the ladies so readily ordered a dress or a hat which they did not need that Eva was astounded. And she had to confess to herself that the egoism, the self-absorption, the unlovable qualities which she often observed in their social life—in their intercourse, conversation, intriguing and gossip—had been suddenly thrust into the background by a common gift for doing the right thing, quite simply, because it had to be done, because there was no question about it, because the woman had to be assisted. Roused from her depression by the bustle of the rehearsals, stimulated to brisk action, she appreciated the better and finer side of her environment and wrote of it so enthusiastically to Holland that her parents, to whom India was a closed book, smiled. But, although this episode had awakened a soft and gentle and appreciative feeling in her, it was only an episode; and she remained the same when the emotion of it was over. And, notwithstanding that she felt the disapproval of Labuwangi around her, she continued to find the main interest of her life in Van Helderen’s friendship.

For there was so little else. Her little circle of adherents, which she had gathered round her with so many illusions, which she invited to dinner, to which her doors were always open: what did it actually amount to? She now accepted the Doorn de Bruijns and the Rantzows as indifferent acquaintances, but no longer as friends. She suspected Mrs. Doorn de Bruijn of insincerity; Dr. Rantzow was too common, too vulgar; his wife was an insignificant German Hausfrau. True, they joined in the table-turning, but they relished the absurd ineptitudes, the indecent conversation of the mocking spirit. She and Van Helderen took the whole thing seriously, though she thought the table rather comical. And so no one but Van Helderen remained to interest her.

But Van Oudijck had won her admiration. She had suddenly obtained a glimpse of his character; and, though it entirely lacked the artistic charm which had hitherto exclusively attracted her in men, she saw the fine quality also in this man, who was not at all artistic, who had not the least conception of art, but who had so much that was beautiful in his simple, manly idea of duty and in the calmness with which he endured the disappointment of his domestic life. For Eva saw that, though he adored his wife, he did not approve of Léonie’s indifference to all the interests of which his own life was built up. If he saw nothing more, if he was blind to all the rest that went on in his domestic circle, this disappointment was his secret pain, to which he was not blind, deep down in himself.

And she admired him; and her admiration was as it were a revelation that art does not always stand highest in the affairs of this life. She suddenly understood that the exaggerated importance attaching to art in our time was a disease from which she had suffered and was still suffering. For what was she, what did she do? Nothing. Her parents, both of them, were great artists, true artists; and their house was like a temple and their bias was comprehensible and pardonable. But what of her? She played the piano pretty well; and that was all. She had a few ideas, a little taste; and that was all. But in her time she had gushed with other girls; and she now remembered all that foolish gushing, that trick of exchanging letters crammed with cheap philosophy and written in a modern style distantly aping that of the poets Kloos and Gorter. And thus, for all her depression, her meditation carried her a stage further and she underwent a certain development. For it seemed incredible that she, the child of her parents, should not always place art above everything else.

And she had in her that play and counterplay of seeking and thinking in order to find her way, now that she was quite lost in a country alien to her nature, among people on whom she looked down, without letting them perceive it. She strove to find the good in the country, in order to make it her own and cherish it; she was glad to find among the people those few who roused her sympathy and her admiration; but the good remained incidental to her, the few people remained exceptional; and, despite all her seeking and thinking, she did not find her way and retained the moodiness of a woman who was too European, too artistic, notwithstanding her self-knowledge and her consequent denial of her artistic capacity, to live quietly and contentedly in an up-country Javanese town, beside a husband wrapped up in his office-work, in a climate that upset her health, amid natural surroundings that overwhelmed her and among people whom she disliked.

And, in the most lucid moments of this play and counterplay, there was the obvious fear, the fear which she felt most definitely of all, the fear which she felt slowly approaching, she knew not whence, she knew not whither, but hovering over her head as with the thousand veils of a fate gliding through the sultry, rain-laden skies....

In these inharmonious moods, she had refrained from gathering her little clique around her, for she herself did not care to take the trouble and her friends did not understand her well enough to seek her out. They missed the cheerfulness in her which had attracted them at first. Envy and hostility were now given more rein; people began to speak freely of her: she was affected, pedantic, vain, proud; she had the pretention always to aim at being the leading person in the town; she behaved just as though she were the resident’s wife and ordered every one about. She was not really pretty, she had an impossible way of dressing, her house was preposterously arranged. And then her relation with Van Helderen, their evening walks to the light-house! Ida heard about it at Tosari, amid the band of gossips at the small, poky hotel, where the visitors are bored when they are not going on excursions and therefore sit about in their poky little verandahs, almost in one another’s pockets, peeping into one another’s rooms, listening at the thin partitions; Ida heard about it at Tosari and it was enough to rouse the little Indian woman’s instincts, the instincts of a white half-caste, and induce her suddenly, without stating any cause, to remove her children from Eva’s charge. Van Helderen, when he went up for the week-end, asked his wife for an explanation, asked her why she insulted Eva by taking the children away, without a reason, and having them up in the hills, thus increasing the hotel-bills. Ida made a scene, talking loudly, with hysterics that rang through the little hotel, made all the visitors prick up their ears and, like a gale of wind, whipped the cackling chatter into a storm. And, without further explanation, Ida broke with Eva.

Eva withdrew into herself. Even in Surabaya, where she went to do some shopping, she heard the scandalous chatter; and she became so sick of her world and her friends that she silently shrank back into herself. She wrote to Van Helderen not to call any more. She entreated him to become reconciled with his wife. She gave up seeing him. And she was now all alone. She felt that she was not in the mood to find comfort in any one around her. There was no sympathy and no understanding in India for such moods as hers. And so she shut herself up. Her husband was working hard, as usual. But she devoted herself more zealously to her little boy, she immersed herself in her love for her child. She withdrew herself into her love for her house. Well, this was her life of never going out, of never seeing any one, of never hearing any other music than her own. This was seeking comfort in her house, her child and her books. This was the personality that she had become, after her early illusions and strivings. She now constantly felt the yearning for Europe, for Holland, for her parents, for people of artistic culture. And now it developed into hatred for the country which she had at first seen in the overwhelming grandeur of its beauty, with its majestic mountains and the softly-creeping mystery that lurked in nature and humanity. Now she hated nature and humanity; and their mystery terrified her.

She filled her life with thoughts of her child. Her boy, little Otto, was three years old. She would guide him, make a man of him. From the day of his birth she had had vague illusions of later seeing her son a great artist, by preference a great writer, famous throughout the world. But she had learnt much since then. She felt that art does not always stand supreme. She felt that there are higher things, which sometimes, in her despondency, she denied, but which were there nevertheless, radiant and great. These things had to do with the shaping of the future; these things had to do above all with peace, justice and brotherhood. Oh, the great brotherhood of the poor and the rich! Now, in her loneliness, she contemplated this as the highest ideal at which one can work, as sculptors work on a monument. Justice and peace would follow. But human brotherhood must be aimed at first; and she wished her son to work at it. Where? In Europe? In India? She did not know; she did not see it before her. She saw it in Europe rather than in India, where the inexplicable, the enigmatical, the fearful remained in the foreground of her thoughts. How strange it was, how strange!...