Van Oudijck, in a pleasant mood because of his wife and children,
suggested a drive; and the horses were put to the landau. Van
Oudijck had a pleased and jovial look, under the broad, gold-laced
peak of his cap. Léonie, seated beside him, was wearing a new mauve
muslin frock, from Batavia, and a hat with mauve poppies. A lady's
hat in the up-country districts is a luxury, a colossal elegance;
and Doddie, facing her, but dressed inland fashion, without a hat,
was secretly vexed and thought that mamma might just as well have
told her she was going to "take" a hat, to use Doddie's idiom. She
now looked such a contrast to mamma; she couldn't stand them now,
those softly swaying poppies. Of the boys, René was with them, in
a clean white suit. The chief messenger sat on the box beside the
coachman, holding against his side the great golden umbrella, the
symbol of authority. It was past six, it was already growing dark;
and over Labuwangi there hung at this hour the velvety silence,
the tragic mystery of the twilit atmosphere that marked the days of
the eastern monsoon. Sometimes a dog barked, or a wood-pigeon cooed,
breaking the unreality of the silence, as of a deserted town. But
now there was also the rattle of the carriage driving right through
the silence; and the horses stamped the silence into tiny shreds. No
other carriages were met; an absence of all signs of human life cast
a spell upon the gardens and verandahs. A couple of young men on foot,
in white, took off their hats.
The carriage had left the wealthier part of the town and entered
the Chinese quarter, where the lights were burning in the little
shops. Business was almost finished: the Chinamen were resting, in
all sorts of limp attitudes, with their legs dangling or crossed,
their arms round their heads, their pigtails loose or twisted around
their skulls. When the carriage approached, they rose and remained
standing respectfully. The Javanese for the most part--those who were
well brought up and knew their manners--squatted. Along the road
stood the little portable kitchens, lit by small paraffin lamps,
of the drink-vendors and pastry-sellers. The motley colours showed
dingy in the evening darkness, lit by innumerable little lamps. The
Chinese shops, crammed with goods, displayed red and gold signboards
and red and gold placards with inscriptions; in the background was the
domestic altar with the sacred print; the white god seated, with the
black god grimacing behind him. But the street widened, became suddenly
more considerable: rich Chinese houses loomed white in the dusk;
the most striking was the gleaming, palatial villa of an immensely
wealthy retired opium-factor, who had made his money in the days
before the opium monopoly: a gleaming palace of graceful stucco-work
with numberless outbuildings. The porticos of the verandah were in a
monumental style of imposing elegance and in many soft shades of gold;
in the depth of the open house the immense domestic altar was visible,
with the print of the gods conspicuously illuminated; the garden was
laid out with conventional winding paths, but beautifully filled with
square pots and tall vases of dark blue-and-green glazed porcelain,
containing dwarf trees, handed down as heirlooms from father to son;
and all was kept with a radiant cleanliness, a careful neatness
of detail, eloquent of the prosperous, spick-and-span luxury of a
Chinese opium-millionaire. But not all the Chinese houses were so
ostentatiously open: most of them lay hidden with closed doors in
high-walled gardens, tucked away in the secrecy of their domestic life.
But suddenly the houses came to an end and Chinese graves stretched
along a broad road, rich graves, each grassy mound with a stone
entrance--the door of death--raised in the form of the symbol of
fecundity--the door of life--and all surrounded with a wide space
of turf, to the great vexation of Van Oudijck, who reckoned out
how much ground was lost to cultivation by these burial-places
of the wealthy Chinese. And the Chinese seemed to triumph in life
and death in this mysterious town which was otherwise so silent;
the Chinese gave it its real character of busy traffic, of trade, of
money-making, of living and dying; for, when the carriage drove into
the Arab quarter--a district of ordinary houses, but gloomy, lacking
in style, with life and prosperity hidden away behind closed doors;
with chairs in the verandah, but the master of the house gloomily
sitting cross-legged on the floor, following the carriage with a black
look--this quarter seemed even more mysterious than the fashionable
part of Labuwangi and seemed to radiate its unutterable mystery like
an atmosphere of Islam that spread over the whole town, as though
it were Islam that had poured forth the dusky, fatal melancholy of
resignation which filled the shuddering, noiseless evening.... They
did not feel this in their rattling carriage, accustomed to that
atmosphere as they were from childhood and no longer sensitive
to the gloomy secret that was like the approach of a dark force
which had always breathed upon them, the foreign rulers with their
creole blood, so that they should never suspect it. Perhaps, when
Van Oudijck now and again read about Pan-Islam in the newspapers,
he was dimly conscious in his deepest thoughts of this dark force,
this gloomy secret. But at moments like the present--driving with
his wife and children, amidst the rattling of his carriage and the
trampling of his fine Walers; the messenger with the furled umbrella,
which glittered like a furled sun, on the box--he was too intensely
aware of his individuality, his authoritative, overbearing nature,
to feel anything of the dark secret, to divine anything of the black
peril. And he was now in far too pleasant a mood to feel or see
anything melancholy. In his optimism he did not see even the decline
of his town, which he loved; he was not struck, as they drove past,
by the immense porticoed villas, the witnesses to the prosperity of
former planters, now deserted, neglected, standing in grounds that
had run wild, one of them taken over by a timber-felling company,
which allowed the foreman to live in it and stacked the logs in the
front-garden. The deserted houses gleamed sadly with their pillared
porticos, which, amid the desolate grounds, loomed spectral in the
moonlight, like temples of evil. But they did not see it like that:
enjoying the rocking of the smooth carriage-springs, Léonie smiled
and dozed; and Doddie, now that they were approaching the Lange Laan
again, looked out to see whether she could catch sight of Addie....