“But if you get ill…”
“Oh… I don’t know…”
There was an unusual sense of exhaustion in her whole being.
“Perhaps you’re exaggerating!” he began cheerfully. “Come on, perhaps you’re exaggerating. What’s the matter, what’s upsetting you, what’s making you so unhappy? Let’s draw up an inventory.”
“An inventory of my calamities. My garden is a swamp. Three chairs on my front veranda are cracking apart. White ants have eaten my lovely Japanese rugs. For some inexplicable reason, a new silk dress has come out in damp stains. Another, purely from the heat, I think, has disintegrated into a few threads. In addition, various minor disasters of the kind. To console myself I plunged into Wagner. My piano was off-key; I think there are cockroaches running around between the strings.”
He gave a little laugh.
“What idiots we are here, we Westerners in this country. Why do we bring all the trappings or our precious civilization, which cannot survive here anyway! Why don’t we live in fresh bamboo huts, sleep on a mat, dress in a sarong and a linen jacket with a scarf over our shoulders and a flower in our hair. All your culture, with which you hope to become rich — it’s a Western idea, and in the long run it will collapse. All our administration — it’s exhausting in the heat. Why, if we want to be here, don’t we live simply and plant rice and live on nothing?…”
“You’re talking like a woman,” he said, half laughing.
“Possibly,” she said. “I’m speaking half in jest. But one thing that is certain is that here I feel a force that opposes me, opposes all my Westernness, a force that thwarts me. Sometimes I’m afraid here. Here I always feel on the point of being overwhelmed, I don’t know by what: by something out of the ground, by a power in nature, by a secret in the souls of those black people, whom I don’t know… At night especially I’m afraid.”
“You’re nerves are bad,” he said tenderly.
“Perhaps,” she answered flatly, seeing that he did not understand her, and too tired to go on explaining. “Let’s talk about something else. That table-turning is strange, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Recently when the three of us did it — Ida, you and me…”
“It certainly was very strange.”
“Do you remember the first time? Addy de Luce… It seems to be true after all about him and Mrs Van Oudijck… and the revolt… The table predicted it.”
“Couldn’t it be unconscious suggestion by us?”
“I don’t know. But just imagine if we’re all playing fair and the table starts tapping and talks to us, using an alphabet.”
“I really wouldn’t do it too often, Eva.”
“No. I find it all inexplicable, and yet it’s already beginning to bore me. People get used to the incomprehensible.”
“Everything is incomprehensible…”
“Yes… and everything is banal.”
“Eva,” he said, rebuking her with a gentle laugh.
“I’m giving up the struggle completely. I’ll just look at the rain… and rock.”
“Once you saw the beauty of my country.”
“Your country? Which you’d gladly leave tomorrow to go to the Paris Exhibition.”
“I’ve never seen anything.”
“You’re so humble today.”
“I’m sad, for you.”
“Oh come on, don’t be.”
“Play some more…”
“Here, drink your gin and bitters. Pour yourself one. I’ll play on my out-of-tune piano, which will be in tune with my soul, which is also confused…”
She went back to the central gallery and played from Parsifal. He, on the front veranda, sat and listened. The rain lashed down and the garden was flooded. A violent thunderbolt seemed to split the world asunder. Nature was all-powerful and in its gigantic revelation the two people in this damp house were smalclass="underline" his love was nothing, her melancholy was nothing, and the mystical music of the Grail was like a nursery rhyme amid the booming mysticism of that thunderbolt, with which fate itself seemed to be passing with its heavenly cymbals over the human beings drowning in the deluge.
2
VAN HELDEREN’S TWO CHILDREN, a boy and a girl of six and seven, were staying with Eva, and Van Helderen came regularly for a meal once a day. He never spoke again of his innermost feelings, as if he didn’t want to disturb the soothing sweetness of their time together every day. And she accepted his daily visits, unable to deny him access. He was the only man she knew to whom she could talk and with whom she could think aloud, and he was a comfort to her in these gloomy days. She did not understand how she had got into this state, but she gradually fell into total apathy, a kind of nihilism in which nothing seemed necessary. She had never been like that. She had a lively, cheerful nature, she sought and admired beauty, poetry, music and art: things that, from her very first children’s books, she had seen around her and felt and discussed. In the Indies she had gradually begun to miss everything she needed. She was seized by a desperate nihilism that made her ask: what is it all for; what is all that piffling whirling about for? When she read about social forces, the great social question in Europe, in the Indies the emerging issue of the Eurasians, she thought: what is the world for if human beings remain eternally the same — small and passive and oppressed in the misery of their humanity? She couldn’t see the point. Half of humanity suffered from poverty and struggled to rise from that darkness — towards what? The other half vegetated stupidly and drowsily in money. Between the two there was a stairway of shades from dark poverty to anaesthetized wealth. Above them arched the same rainbow of eternal illusions: love, art, big questions marks concerning justice and peace and an ideal future… She found it all futile, she couldn’t see the point and thought: why is the world as it is, and why are there poor people?…
She had never felt like this before, but she couldn’t fight it. Slowly, day by day, the Indies made her spiritually ill. Frans van Helderen was her only consolation: this young controller, blond and distinguished, who had never been in Europe, who had been educated entirely in Batavia, had taken his exams in Batavia, had with his supple courtesy, his indescribably strange nationality, by virtue of his almost exotic education, become a dear friend. She told him how much she treasured that friendship and he no longer responded by declaring his love. As it was, there was so much tenderness in their relationship, something idealistic, which they both needed. In the ordinariness that surrounded them, that friendship shone forth as something most exquisite and glorious, of which they were both proud. He was a frequent visitor — especially now his wife was at Tosari — and in the dusk they would walk to the lighthouse, which stood by the shore like a miniature Eiffel Tower. There was much talk about those walks, but that did not bother them. They sat down on the base of the lighthouse, looked out to sea, and listened to sounds in the distance. Ghostly proas, with sails like nocturnal birds, slid into the canal, to the aching crooning of the fishermen. A melancholy air of desolation, of a small world of small people, spread eerily under the twinkling starry skies, where the mystical Southern Cross appeared diamond-like, or the crescent moon sometimes shone, and above the melancholy of the fishermen’s droning song, battered proas, the little people at the bottom of the little lighthouse, floated an unfathomable immensity: skies and eternal lights. And out of the immensity the ineffable approached as the superhumanly divine in which all petty humanity submerged, melted.