De stille kracht. English

by Louis Couperus

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The secretary, Onno Eldersma, was a busy man. The post broughta daily average of some two hundred letters and documents to theresidency-office, which employed two senior clerks, six juniors and anumber of native writers and clerks; and the resident grumbled wheneverthe work fell into arrears. He himself was an energetic worker; and heexpected his subordinates to show the same spirit. But sometimes therewas a perfect torrent of documents, claims and applications. Eldersmawas the typical government official, wholly wrapped up in his minutesand reports; and Eldersma was always busy. He worked morning, noon andnight. He allowed himself no siesta. He took a hurried lunch at fouro'clock and then rested for a little. Fortunately he had a sound,robust, Frisian constitution; but he needed all his blood, all hismuscles, all his nerves for his work. It was not mere scribbling,mere fumbling with papers: it was manual labour with the pen, muscularwork, nervous work; and it never ceased. He consumed himself, he spenthimself, he was always writing. He had not another idea left in hishead; he was nothing but the official, the civil servant. He had acharming house, a most charming and exceptional wife, a delightfulchild, but he never saw them, though he lived, vaguely, amid his homesurroundings. He just slaved away, conscientiously, working off whathe could. Sometimes he would tell the resident that it was impossiblefor him to do any more. But on this point Van Oudijck was inexorable,pitiless. He himself had been a district secretary; he knew what itmeant. It meant work, it meant plodding like a cart-horse. It meantliving, eating, sleeping with your pen in your hand. Then Van Oudijckwould show him this or that piece of work which had to be finished. AndEldersma, who had said that he could do no more than he was doing,somehow got it done, and therefore always did do something more thanhe believed that he could do.

  Then his wife, Eva, would say:

  "My husband has ceased to be a human being; my husband has ceased tobe a man; my husband is an official."

  The young wife, very European, now in India for the first time, hadnever known, before her two years at Labuwangi, that it was possibleto work as hard as her husband did, in a country as hot as Labuwangiwas during the eastern moonson. She had resisted it at first; shehad at first tried to stand upon her rights; but once she saw that hereally had not a minute to spare, she waived them. She had very sooncome to realize that her husband could not share her life, nor couldshe share his: not because he was not a good husband and very fond ofhis wife, but simply because the post brought two hundred letters anddocuments daily. She had soon seen that there was nothing for her todo at Labuwangi and that she would have to console herself with herhouse and, later, with her child. She arranged her house as a temple ofart and comfort and racked her brains over the education of her littleboy. She was an artistically cultivated woman and came from an artisticenvironment. Her father was Van Hove, the great landscape-painter;her mother was Stella Couberg, the famous concert-singer. Eva,brought up in an artistic and musical home whose atmosphere she hadbreathed since her babyhood, in her picture-books and childish songs,Eva had married an East-Indian civil servant and had accompanied himto Labuwangi. She loved her husband, a good-looking Frisian and a manof sufficient culture to take an interest in many subjects. And shehad gone, happy in her love and filled with illusions about India andall the Orientalism of the tropics. And she had tried to preserve herillusions, despite the warnings which she had received. At Singaporeshe was struck by the colour of the naked Malays, like that of a bronzestatue, by the Eastern motley of the Chinese and Arab quarters and thepoetry of the Japanese tea-houses, which unfolded like a page of Lotias she drove past. But, soon after, in Batavia, a grey disappointmenthad fallen like a cold, drizzling rain upon her expectation of seeingeverything in India as a beautiful fairy-tale, a story out of theArabian Nights. The habits of their narrow, everyday existence dampedall her unsophisticated longing to admire; and she saw everythingthat was ridiculous even before she discovered anything else that wasbeautiful. At her hotel, the men in pyjamas lay at full length intheir deck-chairs, with their lazy legs on the extended leg-rests,their feet--although carefully tended--bare and their toes movingquietly in a conscientious exercise of big toe and little toe, evenwhile she was passing. The ladies were in sarong and kabaai, the onlypractical morning-dress, which is easily changed two or three times aday, but which suits so few, the straight, pillow-case outline at theback being peculiarly angular and ugly, however elegant and expensivethe costume.... And then the commonplace aspect of the houses,with all their whitewash and their rows of fragile and meretriciousflower-pots; the parched barrenness of the vegetation, the dirt of thenatives! And, in the life of the Europeans, all the minor absurdities:the half-caste accent, with the constant little exclamations; thenarrow provincial conventionality of the officials: only the IndianCouncil allowed to wear top-hats. And then the rigorous little maximsof etiquette: at a reception, the highest functionary is the first toleave; the others follow in due order. And the little peculiarities oftropical customs, such as the use of packing-cases and paraffin-tinsfor this, that and the other purpose: the wood for shop-windows, fordust-bins and home-made articles of furniture; the tins for guttersand watering-cans and all kinds of domestic utensils....

  The young and cultured little woman, with her Arabian Nights illusions,was unable, amid these first impressions, to distinguish between whatwas colonial--the expedients of a European acclimatizing himself ina country which is alien to his blood--and what was really poetic,genuinely Indian, purely eastern, absolutely Javanese; and,because of these and other little absurdities, she had at oncefelt disappointed, as every one with artistic inclinations feelsdisappointed in colonial India, which is not at all artistic or poeticand in which the rose-trees in their white pots are conscientiouslymanured with horse-droppings as high as they will bear, so that, whena breeze springs up, the scent of the roses mingles with a stench offreshly-sprinkled manure. And she had grown unjust, as does everyHollander, every newcomer to the beautiful country which he wouldlike to see with the eyes of his preconceived literary vision, butwhich impresses him at first by its absurd colonial side. And sheforgot that the country itself, which was originally so absolutelybeautiful, was not to blame for all this absurdity.

  She had had a couple of years of it and had been astonished,occasionally alarmed, then again shocked, had laughed sometimes andthen again been annoyed; and at last, with the reasonableness ofher nature and the practical side of her artistic soul, had grownaccustomed to it all. She had grown accustomed to the toe-exercises,to the manure around the roses; she had grown accustomed to herhusband, who was no longer a human being, no longer a man, but anofficial. She had suffered a great deal, she had written despairingletters, she had been sick with longing for the home of her parents,she had been on the verge of making a sudden departure, but she hadnot gone, so as not to leave her husband in his loneliness, and shehad accustomed herself to things and made the best of them. She hadnot only the soul of an artist--she played the piano exceptionallywell--but also the heart of a plucky little woman. She had gone onloving her husband and she felt that, after all, she provided himwith a pleasant home. She gave serious attention to the education ofher child. And, once she had become accustomed to things, she grewless unjust and suddenly saw much of what was beautiful in India;admired the stately grace of a coco-palm, the exquisite, paradisalflavour of the Indian fruits, the glory of the blossoming trees; and,in the inland districts, she had realized the noble majesty of nature,the harmony of the undulating hills, the faery forests of giganticferns, the menacing ravines of the craters, the shimmering terracesof the flooded rice-fields, with the tender green of the young paddy;and the character of the Javanese had been a very revelation to her:his elegance, his grace, his salutation, his dancing; his aristocraticdistinction, so often evidently handed down directly from a noble race,from an age-old chivalry, now modernized into a diplomatic suppleness,worshipping authority by nature and inevitably resigned under theyoke of the rulers whose gold-lace arouses his innate respect.

  I
n her father's house, Eva had always felt around her the cult ofthe artistic and the beautiful, even to the verge of decadence;those with her had always directed her attention, in an environmentof perfectly beautiful things, in beautiful words, in music, to theplastic beauty of life, and perhaps too exclusively to that alone. Andshe was now too well-trained in that school of beauty to persist inher disappointment and to see only the white-wash and flimsiness ofthe houses, the petty airs of the officials, the packing-cases andthe horse-droppings. Her literary mind now saw the palatial characterof the houses, so typical of the official arrogance, which couldhardly have been other than it was; and she saw all these details moreaccurately, obtaining a broader insight into all that world of India,so that revelation followed upon revelation. Only she continued tofeel something strange, something that she could not analyse, a certainmystery, a dark secrecy, which she felt creeping softly over the landat night. But she thought that it was no more than a mood produced bythe darkness and the very dense foliage, that it was like the veryquiet music of stringed instruments of a kind quite strange to her,a distant murmur of harps in a minor key, a vague voice of warning,a whispering in the night--no more--which evoked poetic imaginings.

  At Labuwangi, a small inland capital, she often astonished theacclimatized up-country elements because she was somewhat excitable,because she was enthusiastic, spontaneous, glad to be alive--evenin India--glad of the beauty of life, because she had a healthynature, softly tempered and shaded into a charming pose of caringfor nothing but the beautiful: beautiful lines, beautiful colours,artistic ideas. Those who knew her either disliked her or were veryfond of her: few felt indifferent to her. She had gained a reputationin India for unusualness: her house was unusual, her clothes unusual,the education of her child unusual; her ideas were unusual andthe only ordinary thing about her was her Frisian husband, whowas almost too ordinary in that environment, which might have beencut out of an art-magazine. She was fond of society and gatheredaround her as much of the European element as possible: it was,indeed, seldom artistic; but she imparted a pleasant tone to it,something that reminded everybody of Holland. This little clique,this group admired her and instinctively adopted the tone which sheset. Because of her greater culture, she ruled over it, though shewas not a despot by nature. But they did not all approve of this;and the rest called her eccentric. The clique, however, the group,remained faithful to her, for she awakened them, in the soft languorof Indian life, to the existence of music, ideas, and the joie devivre. So she had drawn into her circle the doctor and his wife, thechief engineer and his wife, the district controller and his wife,and sometimes a couple of outside controllers, or a few young fellowsfrom the sugar-factories. This brought round her a gay little band ofadherents. She ruled over them, organized amateur theatricals for them,picnicked with them and charmed them with her house and her frocksand the epicurean and artistic flavour of her life. They forgave hereverything that they did not understand--her aesthetic principles, herenthusiasm for Wagner--because she gave them gaiety and a little joiede vivre and a sociable feeling in the deadliness of their colonialexistence. For this they were fervently grateful to her. And thusit had come about that her house became the actual centre of sociallife at Labuwangi, whereas the residency, on the other hand, withdrewwith dignified reserve into the shadow of its banyan-trees. Leonievan Oudijck was not jealous on this account. She loved her repose andwas only too glad to leave everything to Eva Eldersma. And so Leonietroubled about nothing--neither entertaining nor musical societiesnor dramatic societies nor charities--and delegated to Eva all thesocial duties which as a rule a resident's wife feels bound to takeupon herself. Leonie had her monthly receptions, at which she spoketo everybody and smiled upon everybody, and gave her annual ball onNew Year's Day. With this the social life of the residency began andended. Apart from this she lived there in her egoism, in the comfortwith which she had selfishly surrounded herself, in her rosy dreamsof cherubs and in such love as she was able to evoke. Sometimes,periodically, she felt a need for Batavia and went to spend a monthor two there. And so she, as the wife of the resident, led her ownlife; and Eva did everything and Eva set the tone. It sometimesgave rise to a little jealousy, as for instance between her andthe wife of the inspector of finances, who considered that thefirst place after Mrs. van Oudijck belonged to her and not to thesecretary's wife. This would occasion a good deal of bickering overthe Indian official etiquette; and stories and tittle-tattle wouldgo the rounds, enhanced, aggravated, until they reached the remotestsugar-factory in the district. But Eva took no notice of all thisgossip and preferred to devote herself to providing a little sociallife in Labuwangi. And, to keep things going properly, she and herlittle circle ruled the roost. She had been elected president of theThalia Dramatic Society and she accepted, but on condition that therules should be abolished. She was willing to be queen, but withouta constitution. Everybody said that this would never do: there hadalways been rules. But Eva replied that, if there were to be rules,she must refuse to be president. And they gave way: the constitutionof the Thalia was abolished; Eva held absolute sway, chose the playsand distributed the parts. And it was the golden age of the society:rehearsed by her, the members acted so well that people came fromSurabaya to attend the performances at the Concordia. The pieces playedwere of a quality such as had never been seen at the Concordia before.

  And the result of this again was that people either loved her ordid not like her at all. But she went her way and provided a littleEuropean civilization, so that they might not grow too "stuffy"at Labuwangi. And people descended to all sorts of trickery to getinvited to her little dinners, which were famous and notorious. Forshe stipulated that her men should come in dress-clothes and not intheir Singapore jackets, without shirts. She introduced swallow-tailsand white ties; and she was inexorable. The women were low-necked,as usual, for the sake of coolness, and thought it delightful. Buther poor men struggled against it, puffed and blew at first andfelt congested in their tall collars; the doctor declared that itwas unhealthy; and the veterans protested that it was madness andopposed to all the good old Indian customs. But when they had puffedand blown a few times in their dress-coats and tall collars, theyall found Mrs. Eldersma's dinners charming, precisely because theywere so European in style.