The Hidden Force

by Louis Couperus

  “And what about you, Commissioner? Will you be returning to Europe soon?”

  He stared into space, then he laughed bashfully before replying. And finally, and almost in embarrassment, he said: “No, dear lady, I shan’t be going back. You see, here in the Indies I was once somebody, there I would be nobody. I’m nobody anyway now, but I still feel that the Indies have become my country. The country has taken hold of me and now I belong to it. I no longer belong to Holland, and there’s nothing and no one in Holland that belongs to me. I may be burnt out, but I’d still prefer to drag out the rest of my existence here than there. In Holland I wouldn’t be able to face the climate or the people any more. Here I like the climate and I’ve withdrawn from people. I was able to do a last favour for Theo, Doddy is married, and the two boys are going to Europe for their education…”

  He suddenly bent over towards her and, in a different voice, he almost whispered, as if about to make a confession: “You see… if everything had happened normally… then… I wouldn’t have acted as I did. I’ve always been a practical man and I was proud of it, and I was proud of normal life: my own life, which I lived according to principles that I thought were right, until I had attained a high position in the world. That’s what I always did, and things went well for me. I had a charmed life. While others fretted about promotion, I leap-frogged five at a time. It was all plain sailing for me, at least in my career. In my personal life I’ve never been happy, but I’m not the kind of weakling to pine away from grief because of that. There is so much for a man to do besides his family life. And yet I was always very fond of my family. I don’t think it’s my fault that things happened as they did. I loved my wife, I loved my children, I loved my house: my home life, where I was husband and father. But that feeling in me was never fully satisfied. My first wife was a Eurasian, whom I married for love. Because she failed to get me under her thumb with her whims, our marriage didn’t work after a few years. I think I was even more in love with my second wife than with my first: I’m a simple man when it comes to these things… but I’ve never been granted a loving family existence: a loving wife, children who clamber on to your lap and grow up into people, people who owe you their lives, their existence, actually everything they have and are… I should have liked to have had that…”

  He paused for a moment, and then continued, more secretively, in even more of a whisper: “But what… you see… what happened… I’ve never understood, and that’s what’s brought me to this… That, all of that went against, conflicted with life and practical sense and logic… all that”—he banged his fist on the table—“all that bloody nonsense, which still, which happened anyway… that’s what did it. I stood up to it, but I lacked the strength. It was something that nothing was strong enough to counter… I know, of course, it was the Prince. When I threatened him, it stopped… But my God, dear lady, what was it? Do you know? You don’t, do you? No one, no one knew, and no one knows. Those terrible nights, those inexplicable noises above my head; that night in the bathroom with the Major and the other officers… It really wasn’t an illusion: we saw it, we heard it, we felt it. It pounced on us, it spat at us: the whole bathroom was full of it! It’s easy for other people who didn’t experience it to deny it. But I—all of us—we saw it, heard it, felt it… And none of us knew what it was… Since then I have felt it constantly. It was all around me, in the air, under my feet… You see, that… and that alone,” he whispered softly, “is what did it. That’s what meant I could no longer stay there. That’s why I seemed to be dumbstruck, reduced to idiocy—in ordinary life, in all my practical sense and logic, which suddenly seemed to me a wrongly constructed philosophy of life, the most abstract reflection—because, cutting across it, things from another world manifested themselves, things that escaped me, and everyone. That alone is what did it. I was no longer myself. I no longer knew what I thought, what I was doing, what I had done. Everything was thrown off balance. That wretched creature in the native quarter… he’s no child of mine: I’d stake my life on that. And I… I believed it. I had money sent to him. Tell me, can you understand me? I’m sure you can’t, can you? It’s incomprehensible, that strange, alien sensation, if one has not experienced it oneself, in one’s flesh and blood, until it penetrates your bone marrow…”

  “I think I’ve sometimes felt it too,” she whispered. “When I walked with Van Helderen along the seashore, and the sky was so distant, the night so deep, or when the rains came rushing from so far away and then descended… or when the nights, deathly quiet and yet so brimful of sound, trembled around you, always with a music that could not be grasped and scarcely heard… Or simply when I looked into the eyes of a Javanese, when I talked to my maid and it was as if nothing I said got through to her, or as if her answer concealed her real, secret answer…”

  “That’s something different,” he said. “I don’t understand that: I personally knew the Javanese. But perhaps every European feels that in a different way, depending on his predisposition, and his nature. For one person it is the antipathy that he felt from the beginning in this country, which attacks the weak spot in his materialism and goes on fighting him… while the country itself is so full of poetry and… mystery… I’d almost say. For another person it’s the climate, or the character of the natives, or what have you, that are hostile and incomprehensible. For me… it was facts I could not fathom… at least that was how it seemed to me. Then it seemed as if I didn’t understand anything any more… That was how I became a bad official, and then I realized that the game was up. So I quite calmly packed it in, and now I’m here, and here’s where I’ll stay. And do you know a funny thing? Here I may at last… have found the family life I want…”

  The little brown faces peered round the corner. And he called to them, beckoned to then with a kind, expansive, paternal gesture. But they charged off again, their bare feet pattering. He laughed.

  “They’re very shy, the little monkeys,” he said. They’re Lena’s sisters and the woman you’ve seen is her mother.”

  He paused for a moment, quite simply, as though she would realize who Lena was: the very young woman with a gold blush on her cheeks and jet-black eyes, whom she had seen in a flash.

  “And then there are young brothers, who have to go to school in Garut. You see, that’s my family now. When I met Lena, I took responsibility for the whole family. It costs me a lot of money, because I have my first wife in Batavia, my second in Paris, and René and Ricus in Holland. That all costs money, and here there’s my new “family”. But at least I have a family… It’s all very Indies, you may say: an informal Indies marriage with the daughter of a coffee-plantation foreman, and on top of that the old woman and little brothers and sisters. But I’m doing some good. These people were penniless and I’m helping them, and Lena is a sweet child, the consolation of my old age. I can’t live without a woman, and so it happened more or less by itself… And it’s fine like this: I vegetate here and drink good coffee and they look after the old man very well…”

  He fell silent, and then continued: “And you… you’re going to Europe? Poor Eldersma, I hope he’ll soon recover… It’s all my fault, isn’t it? I made him work far too hard. But that’s how it is in the Indies, dear lady. We all work hard here, until we stop working. And you’re leaving… in just a week? How happy you’ll be to see your parents and listen to beautiful music. I’m still grateful to you. You did a lot for us, you were the poetry in Labuwangi. The poor Indies… how people curse them. The country can’t help the fact that we barbarians invaded it, conquerors whose only wish was to grow rich and then be off… And if they don’t get rich… they curse: the heat that God bestowed on it from the outset… the lack of sustenance for the soul and the mind… the soul and mind of the barbarian. The poor country that has been cursed so much will probably think: if only you’d stayed away! And you… you didn’t like the Indies.”

  “I tried to grasp their poetry, and now and then I succeeded. Apart from that… everythin
g is my fault, Commissioner, and not the fault of this beautiful country. And like your barbarian… I should not have come here. All the depression, all the melancholy I suffered here in this beautiful land of mystery… is my fault. I’m not cursing the Indies, Commissioner.”

  He took her hand, moved almost to tears by what she had said.

  “Thank you for that,” he said softly. “Those words are yours: your own words, the words of an intelligent, cultured woman—not like a stupid Dutchman who lashes out because he has not found here exactly what corresponded to his ideal. I know your nature suffered greatly here. That’s inevitable. But… it was not the fault of the country.”

  “It was my own fault, Commissioner,” she repeated, with her soft voice and smile.

  He thought she was adorable. The fact that she did not burst into imprecations or break into exalted language because she was leaving Java in a few days, was a tonic to him. And when she got up and said that it was time she should be going, he felt a deep melancholy.

  “And so I’ll never see you again?”

  “I don’t think we’ll be coming back.”

  “So it’s goodbye for ever?”

  “Perhaps we’ll see you again, in Europe…”

  He waved his hand dismissively.

  “I’m deeply grateful that you came to pay the old man a visit. I’ll drive back to Garut with you…”

  He called inside, where the women were hiding out of sight, and where the little sisters were giggling, and he got into the carriage with her. They drove down the avenue of ferns and suddenly they saw the sacred lake of Lellès, overshadowed by the vertiginous circling of the constantly gliding bats.

  “Commissioner,” she said. “I feel it here…”

  He smiled.

  “They’re just bats,” he said.

  “But in Labuwangi… it might have been just a rat…”

  He frowned for a moment. Then he smiled again—the jovial line appeared around his broad moustache—and he looked up with curiosity.

  “Hmm,” he said softly. “Really? You feel it here?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I don’t… It’s different with everyone.”

  The giant bats gave a shrill despairing call of triumph. The carriage drove on, and passed a small railway halt. In the normally deserted landscape it was strange to see a whole population of motley Sundanese flocking around the small station, eagerly awaiting a slow train that was approaching among the bamboos, belching black smoke. All their eyes were staring crazily as if they were expecting salvation from the first glimpse, as though the first impression they received would be a spiritual treasure.

  “That’s a train bringing hajis,” said Van Oudijck. “All newly returned from Mecca.”

  The train stopped, and from the long third-class carriages, solemnly, slowly, full of piety and aware of their worth, the pilgrims alighted, heads in rich yellow and white turbans, eyes gleaming proudly, lips pressed together superciliously, in shiny new jackets, golden-yellow and purple cloaks, which fell in stately folds almost to their feet. Buzzing with rapture, sometimes with a mounting cry of suppressed ecstasy, the throng pressed closer and stormed the exits of the long carriages… The pilgrims alighted solemnly. Their brothers and friends vied with each other in grabbing their hands, the hems of their golden-yellow and purple cloaks, and kissed their sacred hands, their holy garment, because it brought them something from holy Mecca. They fought and jostled around the pilgrims to be the first one to kiss them. And the pilgrims, contemptuous and self-confident, seemed not to see the struggle, and were superior, calm, solemn and dignified amid the fighting, amid the surging and buzzing throng, and surrendered their hands to them, surrendered the hems of their tunics to the fanatical kiss of anyone who came near.

  It was strange in this country of deeply secret slumbering mystery, to see arising in this Javanese people—who as always cloaked themselves in the mystery of their impenetrable soul—an ecstatic passion, repressed and yet visible, to see the fixed stares of drunken fanaticism, to see part of their impenetrable soul revealing itself in their adulation of those who had seen the tomb of the Prophet, to hear the soft throb of religious rapture, to hear a shrill, sudden, unexpected, irrepressible cry of glory, which immediately died away, melted into the buzz, as if frightened of itself, since the sacred moment had not yet arrived…

  On the road behind the station Van Oudijck and Eva, making slow progress because of the bustling crowd—which was still surrounding the pilgrims with its buzz, respectfully carrying their luggage, obsequiously offering their carts—suddenly looked at each other, and though neither of them wanted to put it into words, they said it to each other with a look of understanding, that they both felt it—both of them, simul taneously, there amid that fanatical throng—felt It, That.

  They both felt it, the ineffable: what is hidden in the ground, what hisses beneath the volcanoes, what wafts in on the distant winds, what rushes in with the rain, what rumbles in with the deeply rolling thunder, what floats in from the wide horizon over the endless sea, what looks out from the black secret eye of the inscrutable native, what creeps into his heart and squats in his humble respect, what gnaws like a poison and an enmity at the body, soul and life of the European, what silently resists the conqueror and wears him down and makes him languish and die, if not immediately die a tragic death: they both felt it, the Ineffable…

  In feeling it, together with the melancholy of their impending farewell, they did not see among the swaying, surging, buzzing throng that pushed along, apparently respectfully, the yellow and purple dignitaries—the pilgrims returning from Mecca—they did not see one large white figure rise above the throng and leer at the man who, however he had lived his life in Java, had been weaker than That…

  Pasuruan—Batavia

  October 1899—February 1900

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  The first English translation of Couperus’s novel appeared in London in 1922 and was followed by an American edition in 1924. The translator was Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (1865–1921), a naturalized Englishman of Dutch extraction, who knew the author and translated several of his best-known works.

  In 1985, for the scholarly Library of the Indies series published by the University of Massachusetts Press, the editor, E.M. Beekman, produced a revised, extensively annotated version. Most of Teixeira’s text is retained on the grounds of its “congruence of tone with the original” (p. 40), but a number of slips are corrected, the confusing British Raj-linked terms of address “sahib” and “memsahib” are abandoned and a number of suppressed, sexually explicit passages restored. A full glossary of Malay terms is provided. Readers requiring a fuller historical, political and ethnic background to the story are referred to Beekman’s very useful edition. However, for all its many virtues this is a compromise translation, in which the language of 1900 occasionally jars with contemporary (American) idiom, while the plethora of Malay terms slows today’s reader down, without, in my view adding greatly to the immediacy or impact of the narrative.

  In this translation I have chosen not to annotate, but to explain terms in the body of the text on first occurrence. Two important Dutch official titles have been paraphrased: “resident” (potentially misleading in English) as “(district) commissioner”, and “regent”, denoting a hereditary Javanese noble employed by the colonial authorities to assist the commissioner, as “prince”. For the sake of consistency, “Eurasian” is used throughout to refer to mixed-race individuals, and “Creole” to designate those of European ancestry brought up and resident in the Indies. Current Indonesian spelling has been used throughout for Malay words, titles and place names. Historical geographical names associated with Dutch colonial rule, like Batavia and Buitenzorg, have been retained in preference to their modern equivalents, Jakarta and Kota Bogor, respectively.

  The Dutch text used is that of the critical reading edition in volume 17 of K. Reijnders et al., eds, Louis Couperus. Volledige Werken, 50 vols (Utrecht/
Antwerp: Veen, 1987–96).

  P.V.

  AFTERWORD

  In 1900, when The Hidden Force was first published, Holland ruled the Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. In 1899, the sultans of Aceh had been defeated and the whole island of Sumatra brought under Dutch rule. The smaller islands, such as Lombok, the Moluccas and the Lesser Sunda Islands, were subjugated in the 1880s and 1890s. And Java already had been colonized for some time before that.

  As it turned out, complete Dutch control over its Asian colony was only to last for about fifty years. But of course nobody could have known that in 1900. To the Dutch governors, planters, businessmen, administrators, police officers, scholars, geographers, soldiers, bankers, travellers, railway engineers, schoolteachers, and their wives, 1900 must have felt like the best of times.