The full moon wore the hue of tragedy that evening. It had risen
early, during the last glimmer of daylight, in the semblance of a
huge, blood-red ball, and, flaming like a sunset low down behind the
tamarind-trees in the Lange Laan, it was ascending, slowly divesting
itself of its tragic complexion, in a pallid sky. A deathly stillness
lay over all things like a veil, as though, after the long mid-day
siesta, the evening rest were beginning without an intervening period
of life. Over the town, whose white villas and porticoes lay huddled
amid the trees of the lanes and gardens, hung the windless oppression
of the evening air, as though the listless night were weary of the
blazing day of eastern monsoon. The houses, from which not a sound
was heard, shrank away, in deathly silence, amid the foliage of their
gardens, with their evenly-spaced, gleaming rows of great whitewashed
flower-pots. Here and there a lamp was already lit. Suddenly a dog
barked and another answered, rending the muffled silence into long,
ragged tatters: the dogs' angry throats sounded hoarse, panting,
harshly hostile; then they, too, suddenly fell silent.
At the end of the Lange Laan the Residency lay far back in its
grounds. Low and vivid in the darkness of the banyan-trees, it
lifted the zig-zag outline of its tiled roofs, one behind the other,
against the dark background of the garden, with one crude line of
letters and numerals that dated the whole: a roof over each gallery
and verandah, a roof over each room, receding into one long outline
of irregular roofs. In front, however, rose the white pillars of the
front verandah, and the white pillars of the portico, gleaming tall
and stately, set far apart, with a large, welcoming spaciousness,
making the roomy entrance impressive as a palace doorway. Through
the open doors the central gallery was seen in dim perspective,
running through to the back, lit by a single flickering light.
A native messenger was lighting the lanterns beside the
house. Semicircles of great white pots with roses and chrysanthemums,
with palms and caladiums, curved widely to right and left in front of
the house. A broad gravel path formed the drive to the white-pillared
portico; next came a wide, parched lawn, surrounded by flower-pots,
and, in the middle, on a carved stone pedestal, a monumental vase,
holding a tall latania. The only fresh green was that of the meandering
pond, on which floated the giant leaves of a Victoria Regia, huddled
together like round green tea-trays, with here and there a bright
lotus-like flower between them. A path wound beside the pond; and
on a circular space paved with pebbles stood a tall flag-staff, with
the flag already hauled down, as it was every day at six o'clock. A
plain gate divided the grounds from the Lange Laan.
The vast grounds were silent. There were now burning, slowly and
laboriously lit by the lamp-boy, one lamp in the chandelier in the
front verandah and one indoors, turned low, like two night-lights in
a palace which, with its pillars and its vanishing perspective of
roofs, was somehow reminiscent of a child's dream. On the steps of
the office a few messengers, in their dark uniforms, sat talking in
whispers. One of them stood up after a while and walked, with a quiet,
leisurely step, to a bronze bell which hung high, by the messengers'
lodge, in the extreme corner of the grounds. When he had reached
it, after taking about a hundred paces, he sounded seven slow,
reverberating strokes. The clapper struck the bell with a brazen,
booming note; and each stroke was prolonged by an undulating echo, a
deep, thrilling vibration. The dogs began to bark again. The messenger,
boyishly slender in his blue cloth jacket with yellow facings and
trousers with yellow stripes, slowly and quietly, with supple step,
retraced his hundred paces to the other messengers.
A light now shone in the office and also in the adjoining bedroom,
from which it filtered through the Venetian blinds. The resident,
a tall, heavy man, in a black jacket and white duck trousers, walked
across the room and called to the man outside:
"Messenger!"
The chief messenger, in a cloth uniform jacket edged with broad yellow
braid, approached with bended knees and squatted before his master.
"Call Miss Doddie."
"Miss Doddie is out, excellency," whispered the man, while with his
two hands, the fingers placed together, he sketched the reverential
gesture of the salaam.
"Where has she gone?"
"I did not ask, excellency," said the man, by way of excuse for not
knowing, again with his sketchy salaam.
The resident reflected for a moment. Then he said:
"My cap. My stick."
The chief messenger, still bending his knees as though reverently
shrinking into himself, scuttled across the room, and, squatting,
presented an undress uniform cap and a walking-stick.
The resident went out. The chief messenger hurried after him, carrying
in his hand a long, burning slow-match, of which he waved the glowing
tip from side to side so that the resident might be seen by any one
passing in the dark. The resident walked slowly through the garden
to the Lange Laan. Along this lane, an avenue of tamarind-trees and
flamboyants, lay the villas of the more important townsfolk, faintly
lighted, deathly silent, apparently uninhabited, with their rows of
whitewashed flower-pots gleaming in the vague dusk of the evening.
The resident first passed the secretary's house; then, on the
other side, a girls' school; then the notary's house, an hotel, the
post-office, and the house of the president of the Criminal Court. At
the end of the Lange Laan stood the Catholic church; and, farther on,
across the river-bridge, lay the railway-station. Near the station
was a large European store, which was more brilliantly lighted than
the other buildings. The moon had climbed higher, turning a brighter
silver in its ascent, and now shone down upon the white bridge,
the white store and the white church, all standing round a square,
treeless, open space, in the middle of which was the town-clock,
a small monument with a pointed spire.
The resident met nobody; now and then, however, an occasional Javanese,
like a moving shadow, appeared out of the darkness; and then the
messenger waved the glowing point of his wick with great ostentation
behind his master. As a rule, the Javanese understood and made himself
small, cowering along the edge of the road and passing with a scuttling
gait. Now and again an ignorant native, just arrived from his village,
did not understand, but went by, looking in terror at the messenger,
who merely waved his wick, and, in passing, sent a curse after the
fellow, behind his master's back, because he, the village yokel, had
no manners. When a cart or trap approached he waved his little fiery
star again and again through the darkness and made signs to the driver,
who either stopped and alighted or squatted in his little carriage,
and, so squatting, drove on along the farther side of the road.
The resident went on gloomily, with the smart step of a resolute
walker. He had turned off to the right of the little square and was
now walking past the Protestant church, making straight for a handsome
villa adorned with slender, fairly correct Ionian plaster pillars and
brilliantly lighted with paraffin lamps set in chandeliers. This was
the Concordia Club. A couple of native servants in white jackets
sat on the steps. A European in a white suit, the steward, passed
along the verandah. But there was no one sitting at the great
gin-and-bitters-table; and the wide cane chairs opened their arms
expectantly but in vain.
The steward, on seeing the resident, bowed; and the resident, raising
his finger to his cap, went past the club and turned to the left. He
walked down a lane, past dark little houses, each in its own little
demesne, turned off again and walked along the mouth of the river,
which was like a canal. Proa after proa lay moored to the banks; the
monotonous humming of Maduran seamen crept drearily across the water,
from which rose a smell of fish. Past the harbour-master's office
the resident made for the pier, which projected some way into the
sea and at the end of which a small lighthouse, a miniature Eiffel
tower, stood like an iron candlestick, with its lamp at the top. Here
the resident stopped and filled his lungs with the night air. The
breeze had suddenly freshened, the north-east wind had risen, blowing
in from the offing, as it did daily at this hour. But sometimes it
suddenly dropped again, unexpectedly, as though its fanning wings had
been stricken powerless; and the roughened sea fell again, until its
curdling, foaming breakers, white in the moonlight, were replaced by
smooth rollers, slightly phosphorescent in long, pale streaks.
A mournful and monotonous rhythm of dreary singing approached over
the sea; a sail loomed darkly, like a great night-bird; and a fishing
proa with a high, curved stem, suggesting an ancient galley, glided
into the channel. A melancholy resignation to life, an acquiescence
in all the small, obscure things of earth beneath that infinite
sky, upon that remote, phosphorescent sea, was adrift in the night,
conjuring up an oppressive mystery....
The tall, sturdy man who stood there, with straddling legs, breathing
in the loitering, fitful wind, tired with his work, with sitting at
his writing-table, with calculating the duiten-question, that important
matter, the abolition of the duit, [1] for which the governor-general
had made him personally responsible: this tall, sturdy man, practical,
cool-headed, quick in decision from the long habit of authority, was
perhaps unconscious of the mysterious shadow that drifted over the
native town, over the capital of his district, in the night; but he
was conscious of a yearning for affection. He vaguely felt a longing
for a child's arms around his neck, for shrill little voices about him,
a longing for a young wife awaiting him with a smile. He did not give
definite expression to this sentimentality in his thoughts; it was
not his habit to give way to musing upon his individual needs; he was
too busy, his days were too full of interests of all kinds for him to
yield to what he knew to be his moments of weakness, the suppressed
ebullitions of his younger years. But, though he did not reflect, the
mood upon him was not to be thrown off; it was like a pressure on his
sturdy chest, like a morbid tenderness, like a sentimental discomfort
in the otherwise highly practical mind of this superior official,
who was strongly attached to his sphere of work, to his territory,
who had its interests at heart, in whom the almost independent power
of his post harmonized entirely with his authoritative nature, and
who was accustomed with his strong lungs to breathe an atmosphere of
spacious activity and extensive, varied work, even as he now stood
breathing the spacious wind from the sea.
A longing, a desire, a certain nostalgia filled him more than was
usual that evening. He felt lonely, not merely because of the isolation
which nearly always surrounds the head of a native government, who is
approached either with formality and smiling respect, for purposes
of conversation, or curtly, with official respect, for purposes of
business. He felt lonely, though he was the father of a family. He
thought of his big house, he thought of his wife and children. And he
felt lonely and borne up merely by the interest which he took in his
work. That was the one thing in his life. It filled all his waking
hours. He fell asleep thinking of it; and his first thought in the
morning was of some district interest.
Tired with casting up figures, at this moment, breathing the wind,
he inhaled together with the coolness of the sea its melancholy, the
mysterious melancholy of the Indian seas, the haunting melancholy
of the seas of Java, the melancholy that rushes in from afar on
whispering, mysterious wings. But it was not his nature to yield
to mystery. He denied mystery. It was not there: there was only the
sea and the cool wind. There was only the sea-fog, with its mingled
savour of fish and flowers and seaweed, a savour which the cool wind
was blowing away. There was only the moment of respiration; and such
mysterious melancholy as he, nevertheless, irresistibly felt stealing
that evening through his somewhat softened mood he believed to be
connected with his domestic circle: he would have liked to feel that
this circle was a little more compact, fitting more closely around
the father and husband in him. If there was any cause for melancholy,
it was that. It did not come from the sea, nor from the distant sky. He
refused to yield to any sudden sensation of the uncanny. And he set his
feet more firmly, flung out his chest, lifted his fine, soldierly head
and snuffed up the smell of the sea and the fragrance of the wind....
The chief messenger, squatting with his glowing wick in his hand,
peeped attentively at his master, as though thinking:
"How strange, those Hollanders!... What is he thinking now?... Why is
he behaving like this?... Just at this time and on this spot?... The
sea-spirits are about now.... There are caymans under the water,
and every cayman is a spirit.... Look, they have been sacrificing
to them there: bananas and rice and meat dried in the sun and a
hard-boiled egg, on a little bamboo raft, down by the foot of the
light-house.... What is the sahib doing here?... It is not good here,
it is not good here, alas, alas!..."
And his watching eyes glided up and down the back of his master,
who simply stood and gazed into the distance: what was he gazing
at?... What did he see blowing up in the wind?... How strange, those
Hollanders, how strange!...
The resident turned, suddenly, and walked back; and the messenger,
starting up, followed him, blowing the tip of his slow-match. The
resident walked back by the same road; there was now a member sitting
in the club, who greeted him; and a couple of young men were strolling
in the Lange Laan. The dogs were barking.
When the resident approached the entrance to the residency, he saw
before him, standing by the other gate, two white figures, a man and
a girl, who vanished into the darkness under the banyans. He went
straight to his office; another messenger came up and took his cap
and stick. Then he sat down at his writing-table. He had time for an
hour's work before dinner.