“Commissioner, so many compliments! Is that all because of the performance!”
“And using that wit to help widow Staats?”
“Couldn’t I do good in Europe?”
“Of course,” he said curtly. “Off you go to Europe, madam. Join a charity organization in The Hague, with a collection box at your door and two and a half guilders… how often?”
She laughed.
“Don’t be unfair. A lot of good is done in Holland too.”
“But doing what you’re going to do for one unfortunate… is that ever done in Holland? And don’t tell me there’s less poverty here.”
“So?…”
“So there are a lot of good things here for you. Your work. Working for others, materially and morally. Don’t let Van Helderen become too infatuated with you, madam. He’s a charming chap, but too literary in his monthly controller’s reports. I can see him coming and I must go. So I can count on you?”
“Absolutely.”
“When shall we have the first meeting, with the theatre committee, and the ladies?”
“Tomorrow evening, Commissioner, at your house?”
“Excellent. I’ll circulate subscription lists. We must raise a lot of money, dear lady.”
“We’ll help Mrs Staats,” she said softly.
He shook her hand and left. She felt limp, without knowing why.
“The Commissioner warned me about you, because you were too literary!” she teased Van Helderen.
They sat on the front veranda. The heavens opened: a white curtain of rain descended in vertical folds. A plague of locusts leapt through the veranda. A cloud of tiny flies hummed like an Aeolian harp in the corners. Eva and Van Helderen lay their hands on the table and it raised a leg with a jerk, while the beetles swarmed around them.
3
LISTS CIRCULATED. The performance was rehearsed and three weeks later was performed, and the theatre committee presented the commission with the sum of almost fifteen hundred guilders for widow Staats; a house was rented for her, and she was set up in a small dress shop, for which Eva had called on connections in Paris. All the ladies of Labuwangi had placed an order with widow Staats, and in less than a month the woman had not only been saved from complete disaster, but her life had been arranged, her children were back at school, and she had a thriving business. All of this had happened quickly and unostentatiously: subscribers had given generously; the ladies were so quick to order a dress or a hat that they didn’t need, that Eva was astonished. She had to admit that the egotistical, self-obsessed, less appealing side that she so often saw in their social life — in their daily dealings, conversation, intrigues and gossip — had suddenly been pushed into the background by a collective talent for doing good, quite simply because it had to be done, because there was no alternative, because the woman had to be helped. After the day-to-day concerns of the performance had roused her from her gloom, and she had been galvanized into acting quickly, she learnt to appreciate this benevolent aspect of her surroundings and wrote so enthusiastically about it to Holland that her parents, for whom the Indies were a closed book, could not help smiling. But although this episode had awakened in her something soft and weak and appreciative, it was only an episode, and when the surrounding emotion had subsided, she was the same. Despite the disapproval that she felt around her in Labuwangi, she continued to centre her whole life around her friendship with Van Helderen.
Because there was so little else. The loyal coterie that she had gathered around her with such hopes, whom she invited to dinner, to whom her house was always open — what did it really amount to? Nowadays she regarded the Doorn de Bruins and the Rantzows as indifferent acquaintances, no longer as friends. She suspected that Mrs Doorn de Bruin was not to be trusted, Dr Rantzow was too bourgeois, too common for her taste, and his wife an insignificant German housewife. Yes, they joined in the table-turning, but they enjoyed the inept stupidities, the indecent comments of the mocking spirit. She and Van Helderen took it extremely seriously, although she actually found the table comical. So there was no one left but Van Helderen to whom she felt close.
She had come to admire Van Oudijck, though. She had suddenly seen his true character and, although it was completely different from the artistic charm that had hitherto attracted her in people’s characters, she saw the line of beauty in this man too, who was utterly inartistic, who had not the slightest notion of art, and yet had such beauty in his simple masculine ideas of duty and in the equanimity with which he bore the disappointment of his domestic life. Because Eva saw that although he adored his wife, he did not approve of Léonie’s indifference to all the interests that constituted his life. If he saw nothing else, if apart from that he was blind to everything in the domestic sphere, this disappointment was his secret and his sorrow, to which, deep down, he was not blind.
And she admired him, and her admiration was a kind of revelation that art was not always paramount in human existence. She suddenly understood that the exaggerated posturing with art in the modern era was a sickness from which she had suffered and still suffered. Because what was she and what did she do? Nothing. Her parents were both great artists, pure creators, and their house was a temple and their fixation could be understood and forgiven. But what about her? She played the piano quite well, that was all. She had some ideas and some taste, that was all. In the past she had enthused with other young girls, and she remembered now that silly phase of writing each other letters in a derivative style, with echoes of romantic poetry. In that way, in her depression, her thinking progressed, and she underwent an evolution. It was almost incredible that as her parents’ child she should not value art above all things.
A process of seeking and thinking moved to and fro in her as she tried to find her way, now that she had lost herself completely in a country that was alien to her nature, among people on whom, without letting them notice, she looked down. She tried to find the good things in that country, in order to assimilate and appreciate them; among people she was happy to find those few who evoked her sympathy and admiration. But good experiences remained just episodes, and those few people exceptions, and despite all her searching and thinking, she could not find her way and was left with the resentment of a woman who was too European, too artistic — despite her self-knowledge and denial of art — to live contentedly and comfortably in a provincial town in the Indies, by the side of her husband who had been swallowed up by office work, in a climate that made her ill, a nature that overwhelmed her, and in company she disliked.
And in the most lucid moments of this movement to and fro it was fear that she felt clearest of all, the fear that she felt softly approaching, she did not know from where it came or where it was bound, but seething above her head, as if with the swishing veils of a fate that moved through the sultry rainy skies…
In this resentful mood she did not gather her loyal coterie around her, she herself couldn’t be bothered and her acquaintances did not know her well enough to visit her. They no longer found in her the cheerfulness that had first attracted them. Now jealousy and hostility gained the upper hand and there was much gossip about her: she put on airs, she was pedantic, vain, proud, and aimed always to be first in the town; she acted as if she were a commissioner’s wife and bossed everyone about. She wasn’t really beautiful, but dressed outrageously, and her house was furnished in an incomprehensible style. Then there was her relationship with Van Helderen, their evening walks to the lighthouse. In Tosari, in the hive of gossip in the small, cramped hotel, where the guests are bored if they do not go on excursions and so are almost on top of each other in their narrow verandas, peering into each other’s rooms, eavesdropping by the thin partitions — in Tosari Ida heard about it and it was enough to awaken her Eurasian instincts and make her suddenly, without explanation, remove her children from Eva’s care. Van Helderen, while visiting his wife for a few days, asked for an explanation, asked her why she was insulting Eva by removing her children from her care without any reason and bringing them up to stay with her in Tosari, which considerably increased the hotel bill. Ida made a scene, with hysterical fits, which made the whole hotel tremble, which made everyone prick up their ears, and like a gale whipped up the babble of gossip into a sea. Without further explanation, Ida broke off relations with Eva. Eva withdrew. Even as far away as Surabaya, where she went to shop, she heard the slanders and smears, and she became so sick of her world and her people that she withdrew silently into herself. She wrote to Van Helderen and told him not to come any more, and entreated him to make it up with his wife. She no longer received him, and was now completely alone. She felt that she was in no mood to seek consolation with anyone in her circle. In the Indies there was no sympathy or fellow feeling for moods like hers, and so she shut herself away. Her husband worked. But she devoted more time to her son; she immersed herself completely in the love of her child. She withdrew into the love of her house. It now became a life of never going out, never seeing anyone, never speaking to anyone, never hearing any music except her own. She now sought consolation in her own home, her child and her reading. This was the lonely self to which she had been reduced after her first illusions and bursts of energy. Now she felt a constant homesickness for Europe, for Holland, for her parents, for people with an artistic culture. Now there was hatred for the country that she had at first seen as overwhelmingly great and beautiful, with its majestic mountains, and with the soft cloud of mystery in nature and in the people.