Out of sheer relief, suddenly relaxed and impulsive, people spent more and more money, trying to vie with the few wealthy Chinese — those from before the opium monopoly, the owners of the white marble and stucco palaces — there strewing coins with their wives, in embroidered grey and green Chinese dresses, their gleaming hair full of flowers and jewels, smelling strongly of sandalwood perfumes. The money flowed, jingling into the tins of the happy servers. And the gala was a success. And when Van Oudijck finally and gradually disclosed here and there — to Doorn de Bruijn, Rantzow, officials from elsewhere — a few details of his visit to the palace and his conversation with the Princess, relayed in a humble, unassuming tone and yet, despite himself, beaming with happy pride, with joy at his victory — that was when he achieved his greatest effect.
The story went round the garden about the Commissioner’s tact and shrewdness in having averted revolution by his word alone. He was lionized, and he poured champagne for everyone, bought up all the fans, bought all the unsold tombola tickets. He was worshipped; it was his supreme moment of success and popularity. And he joked with the ladies, flirted with them. The party went on until six o’clock in the morning. The pancake cooks were drunk and dancing cheerfully around the pancake oven.
And when Van Oudijck finally went home, he felt a mood of self-satisfaction, strength, happiness, delight in himself. The evening had made him rise in his own estimation and he valued himself more than ever before. He felt happier than he had ever felt.
He had sent the carriage home and walked home with Doddy. A few early traders were going to market. Doddy, half-asleep, dead tired, dragged herself along on her father’s arm…
Then, nearby, someone passed and although she felt it more than saw it, she suddenly shivered and looked up. The figure had passed. She looked round and recognized the back of the haji, who was in a hurry…
She felt so cold she almost fainted. But then, tired to the point of almost sleepwalking, she realized she was half-dreaming of Addy, of Pajaram, of the moonlit night under the cemaras, when at the end of the avenue the white pilgrim had given her a fright…
BOOK V
1
EVA ELDERSMA WAS FEELING more listless and gloomy than she had ever done in the Indies. After all her work, the bustle and success of the gala — after the shudder of fear at a possible revolt — the town fell back into its leisurely drowsiness, as if it were quite content to be able to nod off again, just as it always had done. December had come and the heavy rains had begun, as always on 5th December: the monsoon invariably set in on St Nicholas’s Day. The clouds, which for the past month had piled up on the low horizon, swelling all the while, hoisted their water-filled sails higher towards the sky and tore open, as if in a single fury of distantly flashing electric storms, and water poured down in streams like rich stores of rains that could no longer be kept on high. That evening a crazed swarm of insects had flown across Eva’s front veranda and, hypnotized by the flames had plunged to their deaths in the lamps, filling the lamp-glasses with their fluttering, dying bodies that lay strewn over the marble tables. Eva breathed in the cooler air, but a haze of damp from the earth and flowers settled on the walls and furniture, flecking the mirrors, staining the silk and creating mould on her shoes, as if the deluging power of nature was out to ruin all the finely glittering and charming products of human labour. Yet it revived the trees and foliage, which thrived and shot luxuriantly upwards in a thousand shades of green, and in the burgeoning victory of nature the villas became wet and toadstool-like, and the white of the whitewashed pillars and flowerpots weathered to mouldy green.
Eva witnessed the slow, gradual ruin of her house, her furniture, her clothes. Day by day, inexorably, something decayed, rotted away, became mouldy, rusted. And all the aesthetic philosophy with which she had first learnt to love the Indies, to appreciate the good things, to look for the line of beauty in the Indies — both outwardly and for what was inwardly beautiful and spiritual — could no longer cope with the torrents of water, with the cracking-apart of her furniture, the staining of her dresses and gloves, with all the damp, mould and rust, which ruined her exquisite surroundings that she had designed and created around herself as consolation, a consolation for the Indies. Despite all her rationale and intellectual argument, despite finding something charming and beautiful in the land of all too powerful nature and people, in pursuit of money and advancement, everything fell apart and collapsed. At every moment she was forced to fret — as a housewife, as an elegant woman, as an artistic woman. No, in the Indies it was impossible to surround oneself with taste and exquisiteness. She had been here only for a few years, and she felt she still had some strength to fight for her Western civilization, but she already understood better than when she first arrived how people could just let themselves go here: the men after their busy day’s work, the women with their households. Certainly, she preferred the silent and gentle servants, working willingly never impudently, to the noisily clumping maids in Holland, and yet she felt through her house an Oriental resistance to her Western ideas. It was always a battle, not to go under in the temptation to let yourself go, to let the grounds that were too big become overgrown at the back with the servants’ grubby washing invariably hanging out, and strewn with gnawed mangoes; in simply letting her house become dirty and the paint peel — it being too large, too open, too exposed to wind and weather to be looked after with Dutch cleanliness; in sitting in the rocking chair in sarong and jacket without getting dressed, one’s bare feet in slippers, because it was just too warm, too sultry to wear a dress or peignoir, which became soaked with sweat. It was for her sake that her husband was always dressed for dinner in the evenings, with a black jacket and high collar, but when she saw above that high collar his weary face peering out at her, with its increasingly stiff, overworked, clerk’s features, she herself told him in future not to dress after his second bath, and tolerated him at table in a white jacket, or even pyjamas and a jacket. She found it dreadful, unspeakably awful; it shocked her whole sense of civilized behaviour, but he was too tired and it was too oppressively close to demand anything else of him. And after only two years in the Indies, increasingly understanding how to let oneself go — in dress, in body, in soul — now she was losing daily a little more of her Dutch freshness of approach and her Western energy, now she admitted that people in the Indies worked harder than in possibly any other country, but worked with a single aim in mind: position, money, retirement, pension and back, back to Europe. True, there were others who were born in the Indies and had spent scarcely a year away from the archipelago, who weren’t at all interested in Holland, who adored their sunny country. That is what the De Luces were like, and she also knew there were others. However, in her circle of officials and planters everyone had the same aim in life — position, money, and then away, away to Europe. Everyone was calculating the years they had left to work. Everyone saw the distant vision of European calm. The occasional individual, such as Van Oudijck — an exceptional official who loved his work for its own sake, and because it was in tune with his own character — dreaded the prospect of retirement, which would mean stupidly vegetating. But Van Oudijck was an exception. Most did their duty whilst thinking of their later pension. Her husband, for that matter, did the same: worked himself to death in order to retire a few years after he had become an assistant commissioner; he worked himself to death for an illusion of rest. Now her own energy seemed to be draining away with every drop of blood that she felt flowing through her dull veins. In these first days of the rainy season, the constant splashing of the gutters irritated her with their clatter; she saw all the material things that she had tastefully chosen to surround herself with as her artistic consolation in the Indies being ruined by damp and mould, and she fell into a worse mood of listlessness and dejection than she had ever experienced. Her child was not sufficient, being too young as yet to be a soulmate. Her husband worked all the time. He was a kind, sweet husband to her, a good man, a man of great simplicity, whom she had perhaps accepted only because of that simplicity — that settled calm of his smiling, blond Frisian face and the ruggedness of his broad shoulders — after a couple of highly emotive episodes in her youth, full of dreams and misunderstandings and discussions full of high-flown sentiments. She, who was not calm or simple had sought in this simple man to bring simplicity and calm to her life. Yet his qualities did not satisfy her, particularly now, when she had been in the Indies for some time and was beginning to feel defeated in her struggle with the country. His calm, husbandly love did not satisfy her.