The Hidden Force

by Louis Couperus

  She began to feel unhappy. She was too versatile a woman to seek her happiness solely in her little boy, though with the minor immediate concerns and with thoughts of his future, he did fill part of her life. She had even devised a complete theory of child-rearing. But it didn’t fill her life completely. She was seized with homesickness for Holland, for her parents, for their beautiful artistic home, where one always met painters, writers, composers—an exceptional artistic salon for Holland, where the various branches of art, usually isolated in Holland, came together for a moment.

  The image appeared in her mind’s eye like a distant dream as she listened to heralding thunderclaps in the sultry air, close to bursting point, awaiting the deluge that would follow. There was nothing for her here. She felt out of place: she had her faithful group who gathered around her because she was so cheerful, but no deeper sympathy, intimate conversation—except with Van Helderen. And she wanted to be cautious with him so as not to give him any ideas.

  Except for Van Helderen. And she thought of the other people around her here in Labuwangi. She thought of people, people from everywhere. And pessimistic as she was in these days, she found in all of them only the egotistical, selfishness, and the less endearing self-absorption; she could scarcely express it to herself, distracted by the massive power of the rain. But she found in everyone conscious and unconscious things that were unattractive. In her faithful friends, too, and in her husband. In the men, young women, young men around her. Everyone had their ego. In no one was there a harmony between the self and others. That which she disapproved of in one person; in another she found something else unpleasant. It was a critical view that made her feel desolate and gloomy, because it was contrary to her nature: she liked to love. She liked to live in company, spontaneously, harmoniously with many others: at the beginning she had been filled with a love of human beings, a love of humanity. Great issues evoked an emotional response in her, but there was no response to all she felt. She found herself empty and alone in a country, a town, in surroundings where absolutely everything—things large and small—grated on her soul, her body, her character, her nature. Her husband worked. Her son was already going native. Her piano was out of tune.

  She got up and tried the piano, with long runs that turned into the Feuerzauber from Die Walküre. But the roar of the rain drowned out her music. As she got up again, desperately listless, she saw Van Helderen standing there.

  “You gave me a fright,” she said.

  “Can I stay to lunch?” he asked. “I’m alone at home. Ida has gone to Tosari for her malaria and taken the children with her. It’s an expensive business. How I’m supposed to stand this for a month, I don’t know.”

  “Send the children over here after they’ve been up in Tosari for a few days…”

  “Won’t that be a lot of trouble?”

  “Of course not… I’ll write to Ida…”

  “That really is very sweet of you… It would be a big help.”

  She laughed flatly.

  “Aren’t you well?”

  “I feel like I’m dying.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I feel like I’m dying a little every day.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s terrible here. We were longing for the rains, and now they’re here they’re driving me crazy. And—I don’t know—I can’t stand it here any longer.”

  “Where?”

  “In the Indies. I taught myself to see all that was good and beautiful in this country. It was all for nothing. I can’t take it any more.”

  “Go to Holland,” he said softly.

  “My parents would certainly be glad to see me back. It would be good for my son, because every day he’s forgetting more of his Dutch, which I had started teaching him so enthusiastically, and is talking Malay—or worse still, patois. But I can’t leave my husband alone here. Without me he’d have nothing left here. At least—I think so—I like to think so. Perhaps it’s not true.”

  “But if you get ill…”

  “Oh… I don’t know…”

  There was an unusual sense of exhaustion in her whole being.

  “Perhaps you’re exaggerating!” he began cheerfully. “Come on, perhaps you’re exaggerating. What’s the matter, what’s upsetting you, what’s making you so unhappy? Let’s draw up an inventory.”

  “An inventory of my calamities. My garden is a swamp. Three chairs on my front veranda are cracking apart. White ants have eaten my lovely Japanese rugs. For some inexplicable reason, a new silk dress has come out in damp stains. Another, purely from the heat, I think, has disintegrated into a few threads. In addition, various minor disasters of the kind. To console myself I plunged into Wagner. My piano was off-key; I think there are cockroaches running around between the strings.”

  He gave a little laugh.

  “What idiots we are here, we Westerners in this country. Why do we bring all the trappings or our precious civilization, which cannot survive here anyway! Why don’t we live in fresh bamboo huts, sleep on a mat, dress in a sarong and a linen jacket with a scarf over our shoulders and a flower in our hair. All your culture, with which you hope to become rich—it’s a Western idea, and in the long run it will collapse. All our administration—it’s exhausting in the heat. Why, if we want to be here, don’t we live simply and plant rice and live on nothing?…”

  “You’re talking like a woman,” he said, half laughing.

  “Possibly,” she said. “I’m speaking half in jest. But one thing that is certain is that here I feel a force that opposes me, opposes all my Westernness, a force that thwarts me. Sometimes I’m afraid here. Here I always feel on the point of being overwhelmed, I don’t know by what: by something out of the ground, by a power in nature, by a secret in the souls of those black people, whom I don’t know… At night especially I’m afraid.”

  “You’re nerves are bad,” he said tenderly.

  “Perhaps,” she answered flatly, seeing that he did not understand her, and too tired to go on explaining. “Let’s talk about something else. That table-turning is strange, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Recently when the three of us did it—Ida, you and me…”

  “It certainly was very strange.”

  “Do you remember the first time? Addy de Luce… It seems to be true after all about him and Mrs Van Oudijck… and the revolt… The table predicted it.”

  “Couldn’t it be unconscious suggestion by us?”

  “I don’t know. But just imagine if we’re all playing fair and the table starts tapping and talks to us, using an alphabet.”

  “I really wouldn’t do it too often, Eva.”

  “No. I find it all inexplicable, and yet it’s already beginning to bore me. People get used to the incomprehensible.”

  “Everything is incomprehensible…”

  “Yes… and everything is banal.”

  “Eva,” he said, rebuking her with a gentle laugh.

  “I’m giving up the struggle completely. I’ll just look at the rain… and rock.”

  “Once you saw the beauty of my country.”

  “Your country? Which you’d gladly leave tomorrow to go to the Paris Exhibition.”

  “I’ve never seen anything.”

  “You’re so humble today.”

  “I’m sad, for you.”

  “Oh come on, don’t be.”

  “Play some more…”

  “Here, drink your gin and bitters. Pour yourself one. I’ll play on my out-of-tune piano, which will be in tune with my soul, which is also confused…”

  She went back to the central gallery and played from Parsifal. He, on the front veranda, sat and listened. The rain lashed down and the garden was flooded. A violent thunderbolt seemed to split the world asunder. Nature was all-powerful and in its gigantic revelation the two people in this damp house were small: his love was nothing, her melancholy was nothing, and the mystical music of the Grail was like a nursery rhyme amid the booming my
sticism of that thunderbolt, with which fate itself seemed to be passing with its heavenly cymbals over the human beings drowning in the deluge.

  2

  VAN HELDEREN’S TWO CHILDREN, a boy and a girl of six and seven, were staying with Eva, and Van Helderen came regularly for a meal once a day. He never spoke again of his innermost feelings, as if he didn’t want to disturb the soothing sweetness of their time together every day. And she accepted his daily visits, unable to deny him access. He was the only man she knew to whom she could talk and with whom she could think aloud, and he was a comfort to her in these gloomy days. She did not understand how she had got into this state, but she gradually fell into total apathy, a kind of nihilism in which nothing seemed necessary. She had never been like that. She had a lively, cheerful nature, she sought and admired beauty, poetry, music and art: things that, from her very first children’s books, she had seen around her and felt and discussed. In the Indies she had gradually begun to miss everything she needed. She was seized by a desperate nihilism that made her ask: what is it all for; what is all that piffling whirling about for? When she read about social forces, the great social question in Europe, in the Indies the emerging issue of the Eurasians, she thought: what is the world for if human beings remain eternally the same—small and passive and oppressed in the misery of their humanity? She couldn’t see the point. Half of humanity suffered from poverty and struggled to rise from that darkness—towards what? The other half vegetated stupidly and drowsily in money. Between the two there was a stairway of shades from dark poverty to anaesthetized wealth. Above them arched the same rainbow of eternal illusions: love, art, big questions marks concerning justice and peace and an ideal future… She found it all futile, she couldn’t see the point and thought: why is the world as it is, and why are there poor people?…

  She had never felt like this before, but she couldn’t fight it. Slowly, day by day, the Indies made her spiritually ill. Frans van Helderen was her only consolation: this young controller, blond and distinguished, who had never been in Europe, who had been educated entirely in Batavia, had taken his exams in Batavia, had with his supple courtesy, his indescribably strange nationality, by virtue of his almost exotic education, become a dear friend. She told him how much she treasured that friendship and he no longer responded by declaring his love. As it was, there was so much tenderness in their relationship, something idealistic, which they both needed. In the ordinariness that surrounded them, that friendship shone forth as something most exquisite and glorious, of which they were both proud. He was a frequent visitor—especially now his wife was at Tosari—and in the dusk they would walk to the lighthouse, which stood by the shore like a miniature Eiffel Tower. There was much talk about those walks, but that did not bother them. They sat down on the base of the lighthouse, looked out to sea, and listened to sounds in the distance. Ghostly proas, with sails like nocturnal birds, slid into the canal, to the aching crooning of the fishermen. A melancholy air of desolation, of a small world of small people, spread eerily under the twinkling starry skies, where the mystical Southern Cross appeared diamond-like, or the crescent moon sometimes shone, and above the melancholy of the fishermen’s droning song, battered proas, the little people at the bottom of the little lighthouse, floated an unfathomable immensity: skies and eternal lights. And out of the immensity the ineffable approached as the superhumanly divine in which all petty humanity submerged, melted.

  “Why should I attach any value to life, when I may be dead tomorrow?” thought Eva. “Why all that human entanglement and bustle, when we all may be dead tomorrow?…”

  She told him. He replied that individuals did not live for themselves and their own present time, but for all human beings and for the future… But she laughed bitterly, shrugged her shoulders, and found him trite. She found herself trite, too, thinking such things, which had been thought so often before. Yet, despite her self-criticism, she remained oppressed by her obsession with the pointlessness of life, when everything might cease to exist tomorrow. A humiliating sense of atomic smallness overcame both of them as they sat there, looking at the vast skies and eternal starlight.

  Yet they loved those moments, which meant everything to them, since when they were not too aware of their smallness, they talked about books, music, art and the bigger things in life. They felt that despite the subscription library and the Italian opera in Surabaya, they were no longer in touch. They felt that the great, exalted things were very far removed from them, and they were seized, both of them, by a homesickness for Europe, a desire no longer to feel so small. They would have both liked to go away, to Europe, but neither of them could. They were trapped by humdrum everyday life. Then, almost automatically, in perfect harmony, they talked about the soul and the essence of things and its great mystery.

  All its mystery. They could feel it from the sea, in the air, but secretly they also sought it in the dancing leg of a table. They could not understand how a spirit or soul could reveal itself through a table on which they earnestly placed their hands, and through which the energy passing through was transformed from something dead to something alive. But when they placed their hands on it, the table did come alive, and they couldn’t help believing. The letters that they counted sometimes came out in a confused form in a strange alphabet, as if directed by a mocking spirit intending constantly to tease and confuse, suddenly to stop and become coarse and filthy. They read books about spiritualism together, and weren’t sure whether to believe or not.

  These were silent days—silent, monotonous days—in the town, where rain gushed everywhere. Their life together seemed unreal, like a dream that wove through the rain like a mist. And for Eva it was like a sudden awakening when one afternoon, walking outside down the damp avenue and waiting for Van Helderen, she saw Van Oudijck approaching.

  “I was just on my way to see you, dear lady!” he said excitedly. “I wanted to ask you something. Will you help me again?”

  “With what, Commissioner?”

  “But first tell me, are you not well? You don’t look well at the moment.”

  “It’s nothing serious,” she said with a flat laugh. “It will pass. What can I do for you, Commissioner?”

  “Something has got to be done, dear lady, and we can’t do without you. My wife said only this morning: ask Mrs Eldersma…”

  “What is it?”

  “You know Mrs Staats, the wife of the stationmaster who passed away? The poor woman has been left with nothing, just her five children and a few debts.”

  “He committed suicide, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. It’s a very sad case. We must help her. We need a large sum. Circulating lists won’t produce much. People are generous enough, but recently they’ve made such a lot of sacrifices. At the gala they went crazy. They won’t have a lot to give now at the end of the month. But at the beginning of next month, January, dear lady, there’ll be a production by Thalia. Very quick, a couple of drawing-room pieces, without great overheads. Tickets at one guilder fifty or two-fifty, and if you organize it, the house will be full and they will come from Surabaya. You must help me dear lady. You will, won’t you?”

  “But Commissioner,” said Eva wearily. “We’ve just had the tableaux vivants. Don’t be angry, but I don’t feel like playacting all the time.”

  “Yes, yes, you must…” Oudijck insisted rather imperiously, excited about his plan.

  She became peevish. She liked her independence and particularly in these days of depression she was too gloomy, in these dreamlike days she felt too woolly to accede sweetly and at once to the request from on high.

  “Really, Commissioner, I can’t think of anything this time,” she answered abruptly. “Why doesn’t Mrs Van Oudijck do it herself?…”

  She startled herself by saying that peevishly. As he walked next to her, he became upset and his face darkened. The excited, cheerful look, the jovial laugh around his thick moustache had suddenly disappeared. She saw that she had been cruel and regretted it. And
for the first time she realized that however much in love he might be with his wife, he did not approve of her shirking all her duties.

  He was lost for an answer, and as he hunted for words, she was silent.

  Then she said, in a sweet tone: “Don’t be angry, Commissioner. That wasn’t very kind of me. I know very well that Mrs Van Oudijck doesn’t like that kind of thing. I’m happy to take it off her hands. I shall do whatever you want.”

  She was so nervous that her eyes filled with tears.

  Smiling now, he gave her a quizzical sideways look.

  “How on edge you are. But I knew that your heart was in the right place, and you wouldn’t let me down with my plan, and would want to help poor Mrs Staats. But nothing too expensive, dear lady, no lavish expenditure, and no new scenery. Just your wit, your talent, your beautiful diction in French or Dutch—whatever you want. We’re proud of that in Labuwangi, and all those wonderful things—which you will provide free of charge—will be quite enough to make the performance a success. But how nervous you are, dear lady. Why are you crying? Are you not well? Tell me if there is anything I can do for you.”

  “Don’t give my husband so much work, Commissioner. I scarcely ever see him.”

  He made a gesture of helplessness.

  “It’s true, it’s terribly busy,” he admitted. “Is that the heart of the matter?”

  “Show me the good things about the Indies.”