by Pat Shipman
Gretha wrote again to her father on July 12, complaining about Rudolf’s debts and his complete control over their money, which left her nothing for herself.
And then I have to suffer every moment the observations about my family…. Father, I have bought his name and that rank with my happiness. And I am left absolutely without any more courage left.
When I married him, I knew that I would get an old Indies guest [a man with colonial attitudes and habits] and I expected that I would be very happy. And so I have been happy, for one day! I am young, happy, beautiful, and still optimistic about life; and he is old and totally decrepit. I just hope that he will go to Holland and I can be a little bit better off, but he is old and jealous and doesn’t want anyone to look at me. God above! As if they’d leave me alone on his account! The officers here in the Indies, both old generals and second lieutenants, have already come to me amorously and I already have had to reject them!
Yes, Father, the Indies is a very strange country…. But, oh God, could I come back [to the Netherlands]! I have so very many regrets and am so deeply unfortunate! What can I do! If I divorce him I will lose my part of the pension. He has spent all my money, so I will have nothing in the world! That is not a happy life! And I can’t suffer this life any longer.
I wish I were in Amsterdam! [He] has me…“packed away”—in Sindanglaja, a little town where there is not one European soul. Horrible! I never speak with anybody! It is like being dead! But in the name of God, where can I go and what can I do!…I wish that I was with [Nonnie] in Holland; but MacLeod thinks: we are fine here; I don’t have to give my wife clothes, nobody can look at her…fantastic!
But my nerves are shot and I just long for Holland. If I stay another year here, I think, I will be dead or mad…. As for MacLeod, I can never love him again. He has treated me far too badly. He is quick-tempered and sometimes he jumps at me with red, bloodshot eyes and spits on me. I just wish that one day I would become a widow—that would be the best solution, but…it is very ugly to desire somebody’s death; it just came out of my pen before I knew it. I am always ill here; my nerves are bad and I also am very sick in my belly.
Gretha slipped into this letter a small admission that an old general—probably Rudolf’s predecessor at the garrison in Medan, General Reisz—had been in love with her, though she claimed she had turned him down. This might be why Rudolf had decided Reisz would never again promote him. Gretha’s theatricality, her deep need to be admired, her love of social life, shone out of her letters.
Much later, when she had reaped fame and fortune by performing as Mata Hari, she spoke of this time in her life to G. H. Priem. She admitted that she “often gave [Rudolf] cause to be jealous.” Priem then asked what Rudolf’s motivation was in taking her to a remote place like Sindanglaja. She answered,
Nothing else except the wish to find some rest at last. He understood well that I wouldn’t take up with Javanese boys. Looking back at everything, he thought too highly of me. He supposed that, say, without the chance to flirt with men, I would become calm, would maybe repent, become a little housewife in every way….
But good heavens, he cheated himself! After everything that had happened, how could he be such a donkey! Of course I had no peace for a moment in that miserable hole. Even Dreyfus had it better [as a prisoner] on Devil’s Island. No, I wanted to leave and I decided to make his life as unbearable as possible, so that he would take upon himself all the trouble of arranging to leave.
Priem interjected, “But you had a little child.”
She replied,
My doll! O yes, but I can’t play with her the whole day! A human being can’t hold out. I snarled at him, he snarled back, I threatened him with walking away, he threatened to fetch me back. Rightly, [my father] said in the “novel” [about me], that life was a “real hell,” but to tell the truth he should have said that I stirred it up. I wanted to get away, at any price! I wanted to live, I did not want to bury my youth in a grave like Sindanglaja, and I desired to enjoy life.
I wrote home again, hoping that they knew a way to get me out. My father—who loves legal wrangling, who lodges a complaint to the Public Prosecutor after the slightest bagatelle, who in the past was at loggerheads with half or the whole of the freemasonry [lodge] and even brought up a complaint to the Grand Master—my father, who later was at odds with the family and accused every member of the family of unfair intentions, who overloaded justices of the peace, lawyers etc. etc. with work, who always made a mountain out of a molehill—meanwhile wrote a letter to the Office of Justice of Batavia.
Three weeks later, on August 3, 1901, Gretha had not yet received word from her father and so wrote again. In this letter, she made terrible accusations about her husband. Perhaps she thought that if she blackened Rudolf’s name thoroughly, her father would never side with Rudolf over her. Probably, she was finally telling long-hidden truths.
At the end of my tether I write you again and ask you for advice and help. I am alone here in a foreign country without family and without anything and I can’t fight against such a brutal man. It is as if when he took his officer’s coat off [retired], the last bit of decency went away too. He treats me in a more than scandalous manner too vile to describe.
If he is mad or if he has fits, I don’t know, but it looks like that. He never treated me well in the six years of our marriage but what is happening now is abuse. Every second he threatens me with a loaded revolver; he hits me, spits on me, and says the worst things to me in his rage. He for example walks past me and without any reason hits me and says, “Hit me back if you dare!” Nobody hears or sees it and there is of course no witness, so he can do what he wants.
Now I still have to tell you the worst: Can you imagine, Dad, he has had the indecency to say to my face that all I have done is to bore him to death! He, with his old, decaying body, who according to doctors in Batavia is not fit to be married, is bored with a woman like me! Now he wants to have another young woman with him, but he understands that he can’t get another woman without giving her his pension. He wants to force me to ask for a divorce so that I lose his pension and he can do what he wants.
Dad, I have never complained to anybody but you, but isn’t this intensely dirty and vulgar from somebody with a name and a rank like his? “And if you don’t do this,” he says, “then you can die here!” I am ill and have been violently ill in the stomach for eight months…. But I don’t want to die here with such a brute of a man. Oh Dad, his family doesn’t know him. He writes beautiful letters and talks nicely and…Holland is so far away [that they can’t see how he behaves]! But here in the Indies he is well known and he has no friends; here they know him better and he can’t fool them.
Dad, I don’t want to be treated like this anymore but I have no money and I do not want to go into the world without money just to please him. I have never dishonored the MacLeod name and they can’t blame me for anything. But I don’t want to die here, and if it goes on, then it is definitely the end of me!
My optimism is gone! I cannot live with a man who is so despicable. I eat and live apart and I prefer to die before he touches me again. My children caught a disease from their father, the monster, he gave them skin sores! And so have I [got sores]. I am under treatment from a doctor and I am luckily getting better. Shouldn’t a man like that be deeply ashamed? A man with such a ruined body will always make a young woman unhappy!
She wrote, as she had to Rudolf’s mother, that she had a free passage home, possibly because of the illness, but she didn’t want to leave her child behind and would not divorce Rudolf just to get permission to go. Then her financial complaints resumed.
[Rudolf] has a pension of 200 guilders per month and gets another 100 from writing for a newspaper. He can easily pay 100 guilders per month for me and Nonnie in Holland. He could keep 200 for himself plus whatever more he can earn. But he has an enormous amount of debt that is really scandalous—debts from many years, still from Atjeh and before that.
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So please, Dad, help me, yes? But don’t bring any strangers into this sad business— Il faut laver son linge sale en famille—think well on that! His family is high-born; he has changed into Indies habits, very nasty and cruel to his wife, especially when he is fed up with her.
I am so beautiful; how is it possible that I bore a man, especially such an old one, who is so broken down? He says he only married me for my nice head, but now that he has seen it enough times, I can “bugger off”…as if I am a prostitute.
What truly distressed Gretha more than anything else was the insult that she bored her husband. He did not find her sexually attractive anymore. Her vanity, pride, and fragile sense of self were deeply wounded. This statement was by far the most hurtful and dreadful thing Rudolf had ever done to her, in her own estimation.
In this letter Gretha was as blunt as possible about a deeply shocking matter. In the language of the day, she openly accused her husband of giving her and the children syphilis. The “disease” that “gave them skin sores” contracted from Rudolf, the “decrepit body,” the shame he should feel for infecting them, and the statement that the doctors in Batavia declared him “not fit to be married” are point-blank accusations that Rudolf had syphilis and gave it to her and she to the children. All of these, especially the “not fit to be married,” were standard Victorian euphemisms for referring to the transmission of syphilis to an innocent party by a guilty one. Even her remarks about Rudolf having fits of rage might be considered an oblique reference to the bouts of insanity that were a symptom of syphilis (Fournier in 1879 had demonstrated that general paralysis of the insane [GPI] was causally linked to the disease). By 1884, delusions and violent, manic fits or rages were listed among the classic symptoms of syphilis in a dictionary of medical sciences.
Previous researchers have failed to understand these accusations or else have failed to see how they confirm other evidence that syphilis lay at the heart of the MacLeods’ tragic loss of their son and viciously unhappy marriage.
Were Gretha’s accusations true, or was she slandering Rudolf in order to manipulate her father’s emotions? There is no definitive documentary evidence of Rudolf’s syphilis, but there is a good deal of circumstantial evidence, including Rudolf’s medical problems, his unfaithfulness, this letter, and the peculiar circumstances of Norman’s death.
Certainly Gretha was not above telling a falsehood when it suited her, and she displayed a keen sense (on most occasions) of what stories would advance her cause. But to accuse her husband of infecting her and the children with syphilis was a horrific claim in the nineteenth century. Such a claim was much more damning and humiliating than it would be today; it was considered much worse than wife beating or financial fraud, both of which Rudolf also indulged in. The range of incriminating clues, pointed remarks, and otherwise inexplicable behaviors on the part of both Rudolf and Gretha—and the power of this hypothesis to explain several puzzling aspects of their lives—makes a persuasive case that Rudolf was syphilitic when he married.
A day after writing the desperate August 3 letter, Mata Hari was visited by someone from the Office of Justice in Batavia who hand-carried the letter from her father. As soon as the official left, Rudolf’s rage surfaced. He was disgraced by the official complaint and humiliated that someone was sent to check up on him.
According to Zelle, officials visited several times, which produced some reform in Rudolf’s behavior but provoked an ever-deepening resentment, too. Zelle claims that Rudolf forced Gretha, with a cat-o’-nine-tails in his hand, to retract the accusations of abuse in writing. Conversely, Rudolf claimed that, upon being asked to swear to the truth of her accusations, Gretha could not—and went down on her knees in front of the official to beg his forgiveness for filing a false complaint. There is no way to know who is right, since no official records of the visit or visits can be found.
Rudolf claimed the story about his threatening her with a revolver was simply a malicious falsehood she had invented to blacken his name. Yet he wrote to his sister that he was tempted to make it into truth: “Think, to ruin my reputation and to serve for her some years in prison—no, not so bad [if I could get rid of her]! But then, the little one [would suffer].”
Gretha’s sense that her life was being threatened was probably justified.
Once Zelle received Gretha’s August 3 letter, he replied immediately:
With great sadness I received your letter—on September 3 1901—and I have understood that MacLeod is not a man of honor because he who hits or spits upon a woman is not worth the name of a man. Because of your letter I was at the end of my rope and being your father, I have been in touch with the Officer of Justice in Batavia again—this was 28 June but I haven’t yet had your acknowledgment that anything has happened. So if it has had no result, get a lawyer to ask for a separation.
I have spoken to the sister of MacLeod and she knows of everything. Wouldn’t one predict this? The first of August was to be—with her connivance—the day that you have to die? So now you know what kind of sister that is. Get a lawyer immediately because everything is not well. You know you can count on our help. More I cannot do at this moment. Try to get yourself through it and deal with it like an intelligent and courageous woman.
Rudolf told Gretha that if she insisted on returning to Amsterdam, they would again have to live with his sister, for reasons of economy. Gretha hated the idea.
She began trying to influence Rudolf’s relatives. On March 1, 1902, she wrote to Madame A. Goodvriend, née Baroness Sweerts de Landas, a cousin of Rudolf’s whom she found sympathetic and addressed as an aunt. She used her old nickname for Rudolf, John or Johnie. About Louise she wrote: “What woman cedes to her sister-in-law her place in her own house?” She felt that if they returned to Louise and her children, Louise would “very clearly annex” Rudolf’s pension “for herself.” It is an ugly letter, which continues:
Naturally [Louise] possesses nothing and will come with her children, who are dirty characters, to eat with us!…
I have no authority, myself. I cannot fight against her. Louise subjugates John entirely. She follows him like a dog to serve and help him to take off his underwear and his stockings as if she is his valet; but all the time she jollies him and smiles always. If John died, I would be free, but if this Louise dies, we would all our lives have on our backs these dirty children [of hers who are so] badly brought up and common, for she never teaches them anything…. Certainly John physically is not robust but when the puny ones like him are coddled and eat nothing but eggs and meat, they can live a long time.
Later, in the same letter, she added:
I am persuaded that Louise feigns affection for her own profit, but nothing has changed except John is naïve enough to believe that this affection is addressed to his person…. Louise has none but a very coarse conception of housekeeping, and the two children are as greedy and gross as herself. And all this horde come to eat silver with John [spend our money], to the detriment of Nonnie and myself.
I can do nothing, my aunt, even when I wish to. I do not have any fortune: all that I had, John has dissipated and here I am! And I believe still that if he didn’t have Louise, it would be so different…. How is this then possible? She is not the least a cultivated woman, au contraire; her manners are decidedly lower class and rightly, John is so rigid on this point. Her children are not well brought up. I would die with shame at launching them [in society]. Admiral MacLeod wrote that “their education leaves much to be desired…”
But John is very susceptible to flattery. Louise jollies him and obtains what she wants…. She is always sorry that I do not grow ugly, for she cannot attack me on that score. She presses me always to have more children but I cannot understand her motive…. I have said to John “First you must change and then I must take my [rightful] place in my house and afterwards we will see [about having more children],” but for the moment I do not think so.
In March, on their way out of the Indies, the fa
mily went to stay briefly with Dr. Roelfsema and his wife. On the nineteenth the MacLeods boarded the S.S. Koningin Wilhelmina, piloted by the master captain P. Ouwehand, for home.
They could not maintain even a pretense of civility on shipboard. They were greeted in Amsterdam by Tante Frida—Louise—and taken to her apartment to live. Gretha was late for dinner every night, probably to avoid Tante Frida and Rudolf. Her husband accused her of flaunting herself in public.
Gretha and Louise managed to live in the same apartment for barely two weeks before the MacLeod family moved out, going to 188 Van Breestraat. There Mr. Calisch, their onetime friend and now anxious creditor, appeared asking for his three thousand guilders back. Some of Rudolf’s other creditors brought lawsuits against him, and Rudolf’s temper deteriorated alarmingly. He became violent again and resumed heavy drinking. Gretha stayed out of the house as much as possible and, when she was present, repaid his temper with her own forms of mental torture.
On August 25, Nonnie was sick in bed, which brought back frightening memories of the terrible time of Norman’s death in Medan. The next day Rudolf took Nonnie with him to the post office and didn’t return. By evening, Gretha had called the police and reported them missing. She surmised, rightly, that Rudolf had left her and taken the child to Velp to live with friends. She got on a train to Arnhem, seeking refuge and advice at the home of the Goodvriends.
On August 27, Gretha filed for divorce in the court of Amsterdam, through the lawyer Edward Philips. The divorce petition read:
At the court of Amsterdam with notice that Margaretha Geertruida Zelle living in Amsterdam and for this as a domicile uses the office of lawyer Mr. Edward Philips….
—that she on 11 July 1895 married Rudolf MacLeod, a pensioned major of the Royal Dutch Indies Army, living in Amsterdam at 188 Van Breestraat;
—that this gentleman has had intercourse with a woman other than his wife;