Ngadjiwa was a gayer place than Labuwangi: there was a garrison;
managers and employers often came down from the coffee-plantations in
the interior for a few days' amusement; there were races twice a year,
accompanied by festivities which filled a whole month: the reception
of the resident, a horse-raffle, a battle of flowers and an opera,
two or three balls, distinguished by the revellers as the fancy-dress
ball, the ceremonial ball and the soirée dansante; it was a time of
early rising and late retiring, of losing hundreds of guilders in a
few days at écarté and in the totalizator.... The longing for pleasure
and the cheery joy of life were freely indulged during those days;
coffee-planters and young men from the sugar-factories looked forward
to them for months ahead; people saved up for them during half the
year. The two hotels were filled with guests from all directions,
every household entertained its visitors; people betted furiously,
while champagne flowed in torrents, all, including the ladies, knowing
the race-horses as thoroughly as though they were their own property,
feeling quite at home at the dances, everybody knowing everybody,
as at family-parties, while the waltzes and Washington Posts and
grazianas were danced with the languorous grace of the Eurasian
dancers, to a swooning measure, the trains gently floating, a smile
of quiet rapture on the parted lips, with that dreamy voluptuousness
which the Indian settlers express so charmingly in their dances,
especially those who have Javanese blood in their veins. Dancing with
them is not a rough diversion, all bumping against one another with
rude leaps and loud laughter, not the wild whirl of the Lancers as at
Dutch boy-and-girl balls, but represents, especially to the Eurasians,
nothing but courtesy and grace: a serene blossoming of the poetry of
motion; a gracefully designed curve of precise steps to a pure measure
over the club-room floors; an almost eighteenth-century harmony of
youthful nobility, waving and trailing and swaying in the dance,
despite the primitive boom-booming of the Indian musicians. This was
how Addie de Luce danced, with the eyes of every woman and girl fixed
upon him, following him, imploring him with their glances to take
them with him also in that waving and undulating motion; which was
like a dream upon the water.... This came to him with his mother's
blood, this was a survival of the grace of the dancing princesses
among whom his mother had spent her childhood; and the mingling of
modern European and ancient Javanese gave him an irresistible charm.
And now, at the last ball, the soirée dansante, he danced like this
with Doddie and, after her, with Léonie. It was late at night,
or rather early in the morning: the day was dawning outside. A
fatigue hung over the ball-room; and Van Oudijck at last intimated
to the assistant-resident, Vermalen, with whom he and his family
were staying, that he was ready to go home. At that moment he was in
the front verandah of the club, talking to Vermalen, when the native
councillor suddenly ran up to him from the shadow of the garden and,
suffering from obvious excitement, squatted, salaamed and said:
"Excellency! Excellency! Please advise me, tell me what to do! The
regent is drunk, he is walking along the street and forgetting all
his dignity."
The guests were taking their departure. The carriages drove up; the
owners stepped in; the carriages drove away. In the road outside
the club the resident saw a Javanese: the upper part of the man's
body was bare; he had lost his head-dress; and his long, black hair
floated loosely, while he talked aloud, with violent gestures. Groups
gathered in the dusky shadow, looking on from a distance.
Van Oudijck recognized the Regent of Ngadjiwa. Already at the ball
the regent had behaved without self-control, after losing heavily at
cards and mixing all sorts of wines.
"Hasn't the regent been home yet?" asked Van Oudijck.
"Surely, excellency!" replied the councillor, plaintively. "I took
the regent home as soon as I saw that he was no longer able to
control himself. He flung himself on his bed; I thought he was sound
asleep. But see, he woke and got up; he left the palace and came back
here. See how he's behaving! He is drunk, he is drunk and he forgets
who he is and who his fathers were!"
Van Oudijck went outside with Vermalen. He walked up to the regent,
who was making violent gestures and delivering an unintelligible
speech in a loud voice.
"Regent!" said the resident. "Don't you know where and who you are?"
The regent did not recognize him. He ranted at Van Oudijck, he called
down all the curses of heaven upon his head.
"Regent!" said the assistant-resident. "Don't you know who's speaking
to you and to whom you're speaking?"
The regent swore at Vermalen. His bloodshot eyes flashed with drunken
fury and madness. Assisted by the councillor, Van Oudijck and Vermalen
tried to help him into a carriage; but he refused. Splendid and
sublime in his fall, he gloried in the madness of his tragedy, he
stood, as though some explosive force had made him beside himself,
half-naked, with floating hair and great gestures of his crazy
arms. He was no longer coarse and bestial but became tragic, heroic,
fighting against his fate, on the edge of the abyss.... The excess of
his drunkenness seemed with a strange force to raise him out of his
gradual bestialization; and, fuddled as he was, he drew himself up,
towering high, dramatically, above the Europeans.
Van Oudijck gazed at him in stupefaction. The regent was now coming to
blows with the councillor, who addressed him in beseeching tones. On
the road, the population collected, silent, dismayed; the last guests
were leaving the club, where the lights were growing dim. Among them
were Léonie van Oudijck, Doddie and Addie de Luce. All three still
bore in their eyes the weary voluptuousness of the last waltz.
"Addie," said the resident, "you're an intimate friend of the
regent's. Just see if he knows you."
The young man spoke to the tipsy madman, in soft Javanese accents. At
first the regent kept on with his words of objurgation, with his
gigantic, raving gestures; then, however, the softness of the language
seemed to hold a well-known memory for him. He gave Addie a long
look. His gestures subsided, his drunken glory evaporated. It was
as though his blood suddenly understood that young man's blood, as
though their souls recognized each other. The regent nodded dolefully
and began a long lament, with his arms raised on high. Addie tried to
help him into a carriage, but the regent resisted and refused. Then
Addie took his arm in his own with gentle force and walked on with
him slowly. The regent, still lamenting, with tragic gestures of
despair, suffered himself to be led. The councillor followed with one
or two underlings, who had run after the regent out of the palace,
helplessly. The procession vanished in the darkness.
Léonie, wearily smiling, stepped into the assistant-resident's
carriage. She remembered the gambling-quarrel at Patjaram; she took
pleasure in observing the gradual deterioration which was occurring so
visibly, this visible degradation by a passion controlled by neither
tact nor moderation. And where she was concerned she felt stronger
than ever, because she enjoyed her passions and controlled them and
made them the slaves of her enjoyment.... She despised the regent;
and it gave her a romantic satisfaction, an artistic pleasure, to
watch the successive phases of that deterioration. 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. She played with the things of
life and they glided off her and left her as unperturbed and calmly
smiling and unwrinkled and creamy white as before.
Van Oudijck did not go to bed. With his head aflame, with a fury of
mortification in his heart, he at once took a bath, dressed himself in
pyjamas and had coffee served on the verandah outside his room. It was
six o'clock; the air was steeped in a delightful coolness of morning
freshness. But he suffered from so fierce an anger that his temples
throbbed as though with congestion, his heart thumped in his chest,
his every nerve quivered. The scene of that night and morning was
still flickering before his eyes, ticking on like a cinematograph,
with whirling changes of posture. What angered him above all was
the impossibility of it all, the illogicality, the unthinkableness
of it. That a Javanese of high birth, forgetful of all the noble
traditions in his blood, should have been able to behave as the Regent
of Ngadjiwa had behaved that night would never have seemed to him
possible. He would never have believed it, if he had not seen it with
his own eyes. To this man of predetermined logic the fact was simply
monstrous, like a nightmare. Extremely susceptible to surprise, which
he did not consider logical, he was angry with reality. He wondered
whether he had not been dreaming, whether he himself had not been
drunk. That the scandal should have occurred made him furious. But,
as it was so, well, he would recommend the regent for dismissal. There
was no alternative.
He dressed, spoke to Vermalen and went to the palace with him. They
both forced their way in to the regent, notwithstanding the hesitation
of the retainers, notwithstanding the breach of etiquette. They did
not see the wife, the raden-aju. But they found the regent in his
bedroom. He was lying on his bed, with his eyes open, recovering
gloomily, not yet sufficiently restored to life fully to realize
the strangeness of this visit, of the presence of the resident and
assistant-resident by his bedside. He recognized them nevertheless,
but did not speak. While the two of them tried to bring home to him
the gross impropriety of his behaviour, he stared shamelessly in their
faces and persisted in his silence. It was all so strange that the two
officials looked at each other and exchanged glances to ask whether
the regent was not mad, whether he was really responsible. He had not
spoken a single word, he remained silent. Though Van Oudijck threatened
him with dismissal, he remained dumb, staring with shameless eyes
into the resident's eyes. He did not open his lips, he maintained the
attitude of a deaf-mute. At the most, an ironical smile formed about
his lips. The officials, really thinking that the regent was mad,
shrugged their shoulders and left the room.
In the gallery they met the raden-aju, a short, downtrodden little
woman, like a whipped dog, a beaten slave. She approached, weeping;
she begged, she implored for forgiveness. Van Oudijck told her that the
regent refused to speak, for all his threats, that he was silent with
an inexplicable but obviously deliberate silence. Then the raden-aju
whispered that the regent had consulted a native physician, who had
given him a talisman and assured him that, if he only persisted in
maintaining complete silence, his enemies would obtain no hold upon
him. Terrified, she implored for help, for forgiveness, gathering her
children round her as she spoke. After sending for the councillor and
enjoining him to keep a strict watch on the regent, the two officials
went away.
Often though Van Oudijck had encountered the superstition of the
Javanese, it always enraged him, as opposed to what he called the
laws of nature and life. Yes, nothing but his superstition could
induce a Javanese to depart from the correct path of his innate
courtliness. Whatever they might now wish to put before him, the regent
would remain silent, would persist in the absolute silence prescribed
by the physician. In this way he believed himself protected against
those whom he considered his enemies. And this preconceived notion of
hostility in one whom he would so gladly have regarded as his younger
brother and fellow-ruler was what disturbed Van Oudijck most of all.
He returned to Labuwangi with Léonie and Doddie. Once at home, he
felt for a moment the pleasantness of being back in his own house, an
enjoyment of domesticity that always soothed him greatly: the material
pleasure of seeing his own bed again, his own writing-table and chair,
of drinking his own coffee, made as he was accustomed to have it. These
minor amenities put him in a good humour for a little while, but he at
once felt all his bitterness awaken when he perceived, under a pile of
letters on his desk, the disguised handwritings of a couple of furtive
correspondents. Automatically he opened these first and felt sick when
he read Léonie's name coupled with that of Theo. Nothing was sacred
to those scoundrels: they concocted the most monstrous calumnies,
the most unnatural libels, the most loathsome imputations, down to
that of what was almost incest. All the filth flung at his wife and
son only set them higher in his love, girt them with a greater purity,
placed them on an inviolable summit and made him cherish them with a
deeper and more fervent affection. But his bitterness, once stirred up,
brought back all his mortification. Its actual cause was that he had
to propose the Regent of Ngadjiwa's dismissal and did not enjoy the
prospect. But this one necessity embittered his whole being, upset
his nerves and made him ill. If he could not follow the path which
he had determined upon, if life strayed from the possibilities which
he, Van Oudijck, had a priori fixed, this reluctance, this rebellion
upset his nerves and made him ill.
He had once and for all resolved, after the death of the old pangéran,
to raise up the declining race of the Adiningrats, alike because of
his affectionate memory of that excellent Javanese prince, because
of his instructions as resident and because of a sense of lofty
humanity and hidden poetry in himself. And he had never been able
to do so, he had at once been thwarted--unconsciously, by force
of circumstances--by the old raden-aju pangéran, who gambled away
everything, who was ruining herself and her kin. As a friend he had
exhorted her. She had always been accessible to his advice, but her
passion had proved too strong for her. Van Oudijck had from the first,
even before the father's death, judged her son, Sunario, the Regent
of Labuwangi, unfitted for the actual position of regent. The fellow
was petty and insignificant, insufferably proud of his descent,
never in touch with the actualities of life, devoid of any talent
for ruling or any consideration for his inferiors, a great fanatic,
always occupied with native doctors, with sacred calculations, with
talismans, always reticent and living in a dream of obscure mysticism
and blind to what would spell welfare and justice for his Javanese
subjects. And the population adored him nevertheless, both because of
his noble birth and because he was reputed to possess sanctity and
a far-reaching power, a divine magic. Silently, secretly, the women
of the Kabupaten sold bottles of the water that had flowed over his
body in the bath, as a healing remedy for various diseases. There you
had the elder brother; and the younger had quite forgotten himself
last night, frenzied by cards and drink. In these two sons the once
so brilliant race was tottering to its fall. Their children were
young; a few cousins were native councillors in Labuwangi and the
adjoining residencies, but their veins contained not a drop of the
noble blood. No, Van Oudijck had always failed, glad though he would
have been to succeed. The very men whose interests he defended were
opposing his efforts. Their day was over. But why this must be so he
could not understand; and it all upset him and embittered him.
And he had pictured to himself a very different path, a beautiful
ascending path, even as he saw his own life before him, whereas with
them the path of life wound tortuously downwards. And he did not
understand what it was that was stronger than he when he put forth
his will. Had it not always happened in his life and his career that
the things for which he had fervently wished came to pass with the
logic which he himself, day after day, had attributed to the things
that were about to take place? His ambition had now established the
logic of the ascending path, for his ambition had established as its
aim the revival of this Javanese family....
Would he fail? To fail in striving for an aim which he had set himself
as an official: he would never forgive himself! Hitherto he had always
succeeded in achieving what he had willed. But what he now wanted to
achieve was, unknown to himself, not merely an official aim, a part of
his work. What he now wanted to achieve was an aim the idea of which
sprang from his humanity, from the noblest part of himself. What he
now wanted to achieve was an ideal, the ideal of the European in the
east and of the European who sees the east as he wishes to see it
and as he could but see it.
And that there were forces that gathered into one force, which
threatened him, mocking at his proposals, laughing at his ideals,
and which was all the stronger through lying more deeply hidden:
this he would never admit. It was not in him to acknowledge them;
and even the clearest revelation of them would be a riddle to his
soul and would remain a myth.