Louis Couperus

“ Often, in company, suffering and inflicting boredom, enthroned in the brilliance of her white beauty, like a smiling idol, with the langour of her years in India gradually filling her blood until her movements had acquired that lazy indifference for anything that did not spell love and caresses, until her voice had assumed a drawling accent in any word that was not a word of passion: often the flame which Addie shed over her would transfigure into a younger woman, livelier in company, gayer, flattered by the persistent homage of this youth, on whom every girl was mad. ”

“ And Theo, who hated Léonie, who hated his father, who hated Addie, who hated Doddie, in his general hatred of all those about him, who hated life with the stubborn ideas of a fair-haired Eurasian, longing for money and beautiful women, angry because the world, life, riches, happiness—as he pictured it to himself in his petty fashion—did not come rushing to him, falling into his arms, falling on his neck: Theo was willing enough to squeeze out his words drop by drop, like gall and wormwood, silently revelling in the sight of his father’s suffering. ”

“ The comparative isolation she did not mind; she usually was sufficient unto herself. And she answered smilingly, contented and charming with her creamy complexion, which showed still whiter under the light coat of rice-powder against the red silk of her kimono and looked so delightful amidst the surrounding waves of her fair hair.
That morning she had felt put out for a moment: Labuwangi, after Batavia, had depressed her with the tedium of an up-country capital. But since then she had acquired a large diamond; since then she had got Theo back. His room was close to hers. ”

“ This he confessed only to himself, in silence, seeing him always enigmatic—that marionette, that puppet, as he called him—always stiff, keeping his distance towards him, the resident, as though he, the prince, looked down upon him, the Dutch burgher, and wholly absorbed in all sorts of superstitious observances and fanatical speculations. He never said as much openly, but something in the regent escaped him. He was unable to place that delicate figure, with the fixed, coal-black eyes, in the practical life of human beings, as he had always been able to place the old pangéran. ”

“ He hated his father by instinct and innate antipathy; his mother, because she was a half-caste; his step-mother, because she had finished with him; he hated Addie and Doddie into the bargain; he hated the world, because it made him work. He hated every berth he had ever had: he now hated his office at Surabaya. But he was too lazy and too muddle-headed to do harm. Rack his brains as he might, he could not discover how to harm his father, Addie and Léonie. Everything about him was vague, turbid, dissatisfied, indistinct. The object of his desire was money and a fine woman. ”

“ She talked in Dutch and the regent and the raden-aju both answered in Malay. The Regent of Labuwangi, Raden Adipati Surio Sunario, was still young, just turned thirty: a refined Javanese face like the conceited face of a puppet; a little moustache, with the points carefully twisted; and, above all, a staring gaze that struck the beholder, a gaze that stared as though in a continual trance; a gaze that seemed to pierce the visible reality and to see right through it; a gaze that issued from eyes like coals, sometimes dull and weary, sometimes flashing like sparks of [72] ecstasy and fanaticism. ”

“ As they sat rocking about the table they saw him come through the garden; and the eyes of all these women turned to him as to a young tempter, arriving in the sunshine, which touched him as with a halo. The raden-aju dowager smiled and gazed at him, enamoured of her son, her favourite; squatting on the ground behind her, the little golden adopted child stared with wide-open eyes; the sisters looked out, the little nieces looked out, and Doddie turned pale and Léonie van Oudijck’s milky whiteness became tinged with a rosy shade which mingled with the glamour of her smile. ”

“ Beneath all this appearance of tangible things the essence of that silent mysticism threatens, like a smouldering fire underground, like hatred and mystery in the heart. Beneath all this peace of grandeur the danger threatens and the future mutters like the subterranean thunder in the volcanoes, inaudible to human ears. And it is as though the subject race knew it and were leaving matters to the latent force of things and awaiting the divine moment that is to come if there be any truth in the calculations of the mystics. As for the native, he reads his overlord with a single penetrating glance ”

“ And she, after only two years in India, understood more and more easily that laisser-aller—in dress, in body and in soul—now that every day she lost something more of her fresh, Dutch blood and her western energy, now that she admitted, certainly, that in India men worked perhaps as in no other country, but that they worked with one sole object before their eyes: position, money, retirement, pension ... and home, back home to Europe. True, there were others, born in India, who had been out of India only once, for barely a year, who would not hear of Holland, who adored their land of sunshine. ”

“ In her father’s house, Eva had always felt around her the cult of the artistic and the beautiful, even to the verge of decadence; those with her had always directed her attention, in an environment of perfectly beautiful things, in beautiful words, in music, to the plastic beauty of life, and perhaps too exclusively to that alone. And she was now too well-trained in that school of beauty to persist in her disappointment and to see only the white-wash and flimsiness of the houses, the petty airs of the officials, the packing-cases and the horse-droppings. ”

“ The reality is not an India under a great ruler, but an India under a petty, mean-souled blood-sucker; the country sucked dry; and the real population—not the Hollander, who spends his Indian money at The Hague, but the population, the native population, attached to the native soil—oppressed by the disdain of its overlord, who once improved it with his own blood, and now threatening to revolt against this oppression and disdain.... You, as an artist, feel the danger approaching, vaguely, like a cloud in the sky, in the Indian night ”

“ And they felt that, in spite of the circulating library and the Italian opera at Surabaya, they were no longer in touch with the world. They felt the great, important things to be very far from them. And both of them now became seized with a nostalgia for Europe, a longing to feel so very small no longer. They would both have liked to get away, to go to Europe. But neither of them was able. Their petty, daily life held them captive. Then, as though spontaneously, in mutual harmony, they spoke of what was soul and being and all the mystery thereof. ”

“ The lad had but to appear, like a beautiful, southern god, for all the women to look at him and take him into the depths of their imagination, to recall him to their minds again and again; the lad had but to go to a race-ball at Ngadjiwa for all the girls to fall in love with him. He plucked love where he found it, in plenty, in the Patjaram compounds. And everything feminine was in love with him, from his mother to his little nieces. Doddie van Oudijck was infatuated with him. ”

“ Sometimes, suddenly, it crushes me. Sometimes, all of a sudden, I feel that I have not grown used to India and that I never shall; and I began to long for Europe, for life!”
“But Eva,” Eldersma began, in alarm, dreading lest she should really go home one day, leaving him alone in what would then be his utterly joyless working-life at Labuwangi: “sometimes you do appreciate India: your house, the pleasant, spacious life....” ”

“ In the carriage she glanced at her husband, who sat in gloomy silence. And his gloom delighted her, because she thought him sentimental, with his championing of the Javanese nobility, the result of a sentimental instruction, which Van Oudijck took even more sentimentally. And she delighted in his sorrow. And from her husband she glanced at Doddie, detecting in the dance-weary eyes of her step-daughter a jealousy due to that last, that very last waltz of Léonie’s with Addie. And she rejoiced in this jealousy. She felt happy, because sorrow had no hold upon her, any more than passion. ”

“ Thoughts and dreams always remained secret. It was the actions that were so troublesome. For an instant she thought of being more careful in future, of refraining. But she saw before her, in imagination, Theo and Addie, her fair love and her dark love; and she felt that she was too weak for that. She knew that in this she could not conquer her passions, though she controlled them. Would they end by proving her destruction, notwithstanding all her tactfulness? But she laughed at the thought: she had a firm faith in her invulnerability. Life always glided off her shoulders. ”

“ It was strange to see the different types: the pretty, milk-white Léonie beside the yellow, wrinkled raden-aju-dowager; Theo, pale and fair as a Dutchman, with his full, sensual lips, which he inherited from his half-caste mother; Doddie, already looking like a ripe rose, with the sparkling irises and black pupils of her black eyes; the manager’s son, Achille de Luce, brown, tall and stout, whose thoughts ran only on his machinery and his seed; the second son, Roger, brown, short and thin, the book-keeper, whose thoughts ran only on the year’s profits, with his little Armenian wife ”

“ And none of the æsthetic philosophy with which she had at first taught herself to love India, to appreciate the good in India, to seek in India for external plastic beauty and inward beauty of soul, was able to withstand the streaming water, the cracking of her furniture, the staining of her frocks and gloves, the damp, mildew and rust that wrecked the exquisite environment which she had designed and created all around her, as a comfort, to console her for living in India. ”

“ You see, I’ve been somebody out here, in India; I’d be nobody over there. I’m nobody now, I know; but still I feel that India has become my country. It has got the upper hand of me; and I belong to it now. I no longer belong to Holland, and I have nothing and nobody in Holland that belongs to me. I’m finished, it’s true; but still I’d rather drag out my existence here than there. In Holland I should certainly not be able to stand the climate ... or the people. Here the climate suits me and I have withdrawn from society. I have helped Theo for the last time; and Doddie is married. ”

“ While the old princess preceded Van Oudijck into the office, Léonie examined the letters in the middle gallery. They were lampoons couched in foul language, about her and Addie and Theo. Always wrapped in the selfish dream of her own life, she never troubled greatly about what people thought or said, especially as she knew that she could always and immediately win every one again with her personality, with her smile. She possessed a tranquil charm which was irresistible. She herself never spoke ill of others, out of indifference ”

“ But when Addie appeared she thought better of it. In the deepest secrecy of her heart this woman worshipped her sensuality, as in the temple of her egoism: here the milk-white creole offered up all the most intimate dreams of her rosy imagination and unquenchable longing; and in this cult she had achieved as it were an art, a knowledge, a science, that of deciding, for herself, at a glance, what it was that attracted her in the man who approached her, in the man who passed her by. ”

“ Van Oudijck was in a gloomy mood. He was accustomed to receiving, at regular intervals, anonymous letters, venomous libels spewed forth from quiet corners, bespattering at one time an assistant-resident, at another a controller, besmirching now the native head-men and now his own family; sometimes taking the form of a friendly warning, sometimes displaying a malicious delight in wounding; very, very anxious to open his eyes to the shortcomings of his officials and to his wife’s misconduct. ”

“ Labuwangi has been very quiet lately.”
“It’s really terrible,” said Eva. “If I hadn’t all of you, it would be terrible. If I weren’t always planning something and having ideas, it would be terrible, this living at Labuwangi. My husband doesn’t feel it; he works, as all you men do: what else is there to do in India but work, regardless of the heat? But for us women! What a life, if we didn’t find our happiness purely in ourselves, in our home, in our friends ... when we have the good fortune to possess those friends! ”

“ Eva, brought up in an artistic and musical home whose atmosphere she had breathed since her babyhood, in her picture-books and childish songs, Eva had married an East-Indian civil servant and had accompanied him to Labuwangi. She loved her husband, a good-looking Frisian and a man of sufficient culture to take an interest in many subjects. And she had gone, happy in her love and filled with illusions about India and all the Orientalism of the tropics. ”

“ And, in these early days of the wet monsoon, while the eaves of the house incessantly discharged the thick, plashing shafts which irritated her with their clatter, while she watched the gradual ruin of all the material surroundings which she had selected with so much taste as her artistic consolation in India, she reached a more discordant mood of listlessness and dejection than she had ever gone through before. Her child was still too small to mean much to her, to be a kindred spirit. Her husband did nothing but work. ”