He couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t conceive why things were as they were and becoming worse. There was no logic to it. Since the logical reaction would be for them to love him, however high and mighty and strict they found him. And indeed, did he not so often temper that authoritarian severity with the genial laugh beneath the wide moustache, under a more easygoing friendliness or warning and correction? On official tours was he not the sociable commissioner, who regarded the tour with his officials as a sport, as a wonderful excursion on horseback through the coffee plantations, calling at the coffee warehouses? Did he not regard it as a pleasant trip, which relaxed the muscles after so many weeks of office work? The great procession of district heads following on their little ponies, riding their frisky mounts like nimble monkeys, flags in hand, the gamelan orchestras sprinkling their crystalline notes of welcome wherever he went, and in the evening the carefully prepared meal in the hostels and late into the night the games of cards.
Hadn’t they said, his officials, in informal moments, that he was a commissioner after their own hearts, a tireless horseman, good company at meals and young enough to take the shawl from the dancing girl and dance with her for a moment, cleverly performing the lithe, stylized movements of the hands, feet and hips — instead of excusing himself by paying her money and letting her dance with the native official? He never felt as comfortable as on tour. And now he was gloomy, discontent, not understanding what forces were thwarting him in the dark — him, the man of honesty and light, of simple ethical principles, of serious dedication to work. He thought of going on tour soon and using the physical activity to throw off the gloom oppressing him. He would ask Theo to come with him and take some exercise for a few days. He loved his son, though he thought him unwise, rash, hot-headed, lacking perseverance in his work, never satisfied with his superiors, resisting his manager too tactlessly until he made his position untenable at yet another coffee plantation or sugar factory where he was working. He believed that Theo must make his own way in life, just as he, Van Oudijck, had done, instead of relying completely on his father’s protection and position as a district commissioner. He was not a man for nepotism. He would never prefer his son above someone else with equal rights. He had often said to nephews, who were keen on obtaining concessions in Labuwangi, that he preferred not to have relatives in his district, and that they should expect nothing from him except complete impartiality. That was how he had made it, and that was how he expected them to make it, and Theo too. And yet, he secretly observed Theo, with all his father’s love; secretly, he deeply regretted the fact that Theo lacked perseverance and no longer focused on his future, his career, an honourable place in society, based on either esteem or money. The boy lived from day to day, without a thought for tomorrow… Perhaps he was outwardly cool towards Theo: well, he would have a confidential chat with him, give him some advice, and he would ask at any rate if Theo would come on tour with him. The thought of just under six days’ riding in the pure mountain air — through the coffee plantations, inspecting the irrigation works, doing the most pleasant part of his work — so broadened his mind, clarified his outlook, that he stopped thinking about the letters. He was a man with a clear, simple view of life: of course he found life natural and not confused or complicated. His life had progressed up a visible staircase openly and gradually, with a view of a gleaming pinnacle of ambition, and he had never been able or willing to see what writhed, what churned in the dark shadows, what bubbled up from the abyss, close to his feet. He was blind to the life that operates beneath the surface. He didn’t believe in it, just as a mountain-dweller who has for a long time lived near a dormant volcano does not believe in the fire inside it, that survives deeply hidden and escapes only as hot steam or sulphurous air. He believed neither in the power above things nor in the power that resided in things themselves. He didn’t believe in silent fate or in silent gradualness. He believed only what he saw with his own eyes: in the harvest, the roads, the districts and villages, and in the prosperity of his district, in his career that he saw as an upward curve ahead of him. In this unclouded clarity of a simple male nature, in this universal axiom of just rule, just ambition and a practical sense of duty there was only one weakness: the deep tenderness that he felt for his own home, which, being blind, he did not see for what it was deep down, but only according to his fixed principles as to how his wife and his children should be.
He had not learnt from experience, since he had loved his first wife as much as he now loved Léonie.
He loved his wife because she was his wife — the centre of his circle. He loved the circle for its own sake and not the individuals, the links of which it was composed. He had not learnt from experience. He did not think according to life’s changing hues, he thought according to his ideas and principles. They had made him a man and made him powerful, as well as a good administrator. They had also generally made him, in accordance with his nature, a good person. But because there was so much unconscious tenderness in him, unanalysed and simply deeply felt, and because he did not believe in the hidden force, in the life hidden within — in what writhed and churned like volcanic fires under mountains of majesty, like troubles under a throne — because he did not believe in the mysticism of visible things, life could sometimes find him unprepared and weak, when — divinely serene and stronger than mankind — it deviated from what he thought logical.
2
THE MYSTICISM OF VISIBLE THINGS on the island of mystery called Java… outwardly a docile colony with a subject race that was no match for the rough merchants, who in the heyday of their Dutch Republic, with the youthful strength of a young nation eager and hungry for profit, rotund and cool-blooded, planted their feet and their flag in the collapsing empires, the thrones tottering as if there had been an earthquake. But deep down this island had never been conquered. Although smiling with dignified contempt — resigned, bowing to its fate — deep down, despite a grovelling veneration, it was living freely its own mysterious life, hidden from Western eyes, however hard they tried to fathom the mystery — as if there had been a philosophy of being sure to preserve one’s dignified equilibrium with a smile, giving way flexibly, apparently politely seeking rapprochement — but deep down with a divine certainty about its own opinion, and so far removed from the thinking of the rulers, the civilization of the rulers, that there would never be solidarity between master and servant, because the insurmountable distance remains, that goes on proliferating in one’s mind and blood. And the Westerner, proud of his power, of his civilization, his humanity is seated high on his throne, blind, selfish, self-obsessed within the intricate mechanism of his authority within which he operates as precisely as clockwork, controlling each revolution until to the foreigner looking from outside this conquest of the visible, this colonization of a land physically and spiritually alien, appears a masterpiece, the creation of a new world.