Next day, when Eldersma had gone to the office and Eva was moving
about the house, in sarong and kabaai, on her domestic duties, she
saw Frans van Helderen coming through the garden.
"May I?" he called out.
"Certainly," she called back. "Come in. But I'm on my way to the
godown."
And she held up her bunch of keys.
"I'm due at the resident's in half an hour, but I'm too early ... so
I just looked in."
She smiled.
"But I'm busy, you know!" she said. "Come along to the godown with me."
He followed her; he was wearing a black alpaca jacket, because he
had to go to the resident presently.
"How's Ida?" asked Eva. "Did she sleep well after her séance of
last night?"
"Only fairly well," said Frans van Helderen. "I don't think she ought
to do any more. She kept waking with a start, falling on my neck and
begging me to forgive her, I don't know what for."
"It didn't upset me at all," said Eva, "though I don't understand it
in the least."
She opened the godown, called the cook and gave the woman her
orders. The cook was latta; [10] and Eva loved teasing the old thing.
"La ... la-illa-lala!" she cried.
And the cook gave a start and echoed the cry and recovered herself
the next moment, begging for forgiveness.
"Throw down, cook, throw down!" cried Eva, in Malay.
And the cook, acting on the suggestion, flung down a tray of litchis
and mangosteens and, at once recovering, stooped and picked up the
scattered fruits from the floor, imploring to be forgiven and shaking
her head and clicking her tongue.
"Come, we'd better go!" said Eva to Frans. "Else she'll be breaking
my eggs presently. "Out of this, cook, outside!"
"Out of this, outside!" echoed the latta cook. "Oh, mem sahib, beg
pardon, mem sahib, oh, enough, enough, mem sahib!"
"Come and sit down for a little," said Eva to Van Helderen.
He went with her:
"You're so cheerful," he said.
"Aren't you?"
"No, I've been feeling sad, lately."
"I too. I told you so yesterday. It's something in the Labuwangi
air. There's no telling what this table-turning has in store for us."
They sat down in the back verandah. He sighed.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"I can't help it," he said. "I care for you so. I love you."
She was silent for an instant.
"Again?" she then said, reproachfully.
He did not answer.
"I have told you, mine is not a passionate nature. I am cold. I love
my husband and my child. Let's be friends, Van Helderen."
"I'm fighting against it; but it's no use."
"I'm fond of Ida; I wouldn't make her unhappy for the world."
"I don't believe I was ever fond of her."
"Van Helderen!..."
"If I was, it was only for her pretty face. But white though Ida may
be, she's a half-caste ... with her whimsies and her childish little
tragedies. I didn't see it so much at first, but I see it now, of
course. I'd met women from Europe before I met you. But you were a
revelation to me, a revelation of all the charm and artistic grace
that a woman can possess.... And the exotic side in you appeals to
my own exotic side."
"I value your friendship highly. Let things remain as they are."
"Sometimes it's just as though I were mad, sometimes I dream
... that we're travelling in Europe together, that we're in Italy or
Paris. Sometimes I see us sitting together over a fire, in a room of
our own, you talking of art, I of the modern, social developments of
our time. But, after that, I see us together ... more intimately...."
"Van Helderen!..."
"It's no longer any use your warning me. I love you, Eva, Eva...."
"I don't believe there's another country where there's so much love
going about as in India! I suppose it's the heat...."
"Don't crush me with your sarcasm. No other woman ever made such an
appeal to my whole soul and body as you do, Eva...."
She shrugged her shoulders:
"Don't be angry, Van Helderen, but I can't stand these
commonplaces. Let us be sensible. I have a charming husband, you have
a dear little wife. We're all good, pleasant friends together."
"You're so cold!"
"I don't want to spoil the happiness of our friendship."
"Friendship!"
"Friendship is what I said. There is nothing I value so highly,
except my domestic happiness. I couldn't live without friends. I
am happy in my husband and my child; next to these I need friends,
above all things."
"So that they can admire you, so that you can rule over them!" said
he, angrily.
She looked him in the face:
"Perhaps," she said, coolly. "Perhaps I have a need of admiration
and of ruling over others. We all have our weaknesses."
"I have mine," he said, bitterly.
"Come," she said, in a kinder tone, "let us remain friends."
"I am terribly unhappy," he said, in a dull voice. "I feel as if I
had missed everything in life. I have never been out of Java and
I feel there's something lacking in me because I have never seen
ice and snow. Snow: I think of it as a sort of mysterious unknown
purity, which I long for, but which I never seem to meet. When shall
I see Europe? When shall I cease to rave about Il Trovatore and
manage to visit Bayreuth? When shall I come within range of you,
Eva? I'm feeling for everything with my antennæ, like a wingless
insect.... What is my life?... With Ida, with three children, whom I
foresee growing up like their mother!... I shall remain controller for
years and then--possibly--be promoted to assistant-resident ... and
so remain. And then at last I shall receive my dismissal--or ask for
it--and go to Sukabumi to live, to vegetate on a small pension. I
feel everything in me longing for idleness...."
"You like your work, for all that; you're a first-rate
official. Eldersma always says that in India a man who doesn't work
and who doesn't love his work is lost."
"Your nature is not made for love and mine is not made for work: not
for that and nothing else. I can work for an aim that I see before
me, a beautiful aim; but I can't work ... just for work's sake and
to fill the emptiness in my life."
"Your aim is India...."
"A fine phrase," he said. "It may be so for a man like the resident,
who has succeeded in his career and who never has to sit studying the
Colonial List and calculating on the illness of this man or the death
of that ... so that he may get promoted. It's all right for a man like
Van Oudijck, who, in his genuine, honest idealism, thinks that his
aim is India, not because of Holland, but because of India herself,
because of the native whom he, the official, protects against the
tyranny of the landlords and planters. I am more cynical by nature...."
"But don't be so lukewarm about India. It's not merely a fine phrase:
I feel like that myself. India is our whole greatness, the greatness
of us Hollanders. Listen to foreigners speaking of India: they are all
enchanted with her glory, with our methods of colonization.... Don't
have anything to do with the wretched Dutch spirit of our people at
home, who know nothing about India, who always have a sneering word for
India, who are so petty and stiff and bourgeois and narrow-minded...."
"I didn't know that you were so enthusiastic about India. Only
yesterday you were full of wretched anxieties, and I was standing up
for my country...."
"Oh, it gives me a sort of shudder, the mystery in the evenings,
when something seems to threaten I don't know what! I'm afraid of the
future; there's danger ahead of us!... I feel that I, personally, am
still very remote from India, though I don't want to be; that I miss
the art amid which I was educated; that I miss here, in our everyday
life, the plastic beauty which both my parents always pointed out to
me.... But I am not unjust. And I think that India, as our colony,
is great; I think that we, in our colony, are great...."
"Formerly, perhaps it was so. Nowadays, everything is going wrong;
nowadays, we are no longer great. You have an artistic nature;
you are always looking for artistic perfection in India, though you
seldom find it. And then your mind is confronted with that greatness,
that glory. That's the poetry of it. The prose of it is a gigantic
but exhausted colony, still governed from Holland with one idea: the
pursuit of gain. 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; I see the danger as something very real, something
rising--before Holland--if not from America and Japan, then out of
the soil of India herself...."
She smiled:
"I like you when you talk like this," she said. "I should end by
falling in with your views."
"If I could achieve that by talking!" he laughed, bitterly, getting
up. "My half hour is over: the resident is expecting me and he doesn't
like waiting a minute. Goodbye ... and forgive me."
"Tell me," she said, "am I a flirt?"
"No," he replied. "You are what you are. And I can't help it: I
love you.... I am always stretching out my poor antennæ. That is
my fate...."
"I shall help you to forget me," said she, with affectionate
conviction.
He gave a little laugh, bowed and went away. She saw him cross the
road to the grounds of the resident's house, where a messenger met him.
"Really life, when all is said, is one long self-deception, a
wandering amid illusions," she thought, sadly, drearily. "A great
aim, an universal aim ... or even a modest aim for one's self,
for one's own body and soul: O God, how little it all is! And how
we roam about, knowing nothing! And each of us seeks his own little
aim, his illusion. The only happy people are merely exceptions, like
Léonie van Oudijck, who lives no more than a beautiful flower does,
or a beautiful animal."
Her child came toddling up to her, a pretty, fair-haired, plump
little boy.
"Sonny," she thought, "how will it be with you? What will be your
portion? Oh, perhaps nothing new! Perhaps a repetition of what
has so often been before. Life is a story which is always being
repeated.... Oh, when we feel like this, how oppressive India can
be!..."
She kissed her boy; her tears trickled over his fair curls.
"Van Oudijck has his residency; I my little circle of ... admirers
and subjects; Frans his love ... for me: we all have our playthings,
just like my little Onno playing with his little horse. How small
we are, how small!... All our lives we make believe, pretending,
imagining all sorts of things, thinking that we are giving a path or
a direction to our poor, aimless little lives. Oh, why am I like this,
sonny? Sonny, sonny, how will it be with you?"