Then there was suddenly a vacancy in Batavia. The names of two or three commissioners were mentioned, but Van Oudijck had the best chance. He fretted about it, he was apprehensive: he didn’t like Batavia as a district. He would not be able to work there as he had worked here, devoting himself assiduously to promoting so many different interests, both cultural and social. He would have preferred an appointment in Surabaya, where there was a lot happening, or in one of the Principalities, where his tact in dealing with the Javanese nobility would have stood him in good stead. But Batavia! For a commissioner, the least interesting district as an officiaclass="underline" for the position of district commissioner the least flattering aspect was the arrogance of the place, close to the governor general, right in the midst of the most senior officials, so that the commissioner, virtually all-powerful elsewhere, was no more than another senior official among members of the Council of the Indies, and too close to Buitenzorg, with its conceited secretariat, whose bureaucracy and red tape were in conflict with administrative practice and the actual work of the commissioners themselves.
The possibility of his appointment threw him into complete confusion, and made him jumpier than ever, now that he would have to leave Labuwangi at a month’s notice, and sell his household effects. It would be a real wrench to leave Labuwangi. Despite what he had suffered there, he loved the town and especially his district. Throughout his territory in all those years he had left traces of his industry, his concentration, his ambition, his love. Now, in less than a month, he might have to hand it all over to a successor, tear himself away from everything he had lovingly provided and promoted. And the successor might change everything, and totally disagree with him. It provoked a melancholy gloom in him. The fact that a promotion would also take him closer to retirement, meant nothing to him. That future of idleness and boredom as old age approached was a nightmare to him.
Then his possible promotion suddenly became such a pathological obsession that the improbable happened and he wrote to the Director of the Colonial Service and the Governor General requesting that he be left at Labuwangi. Little of these letters leaked out; he himself said nothing about them either in the family circle or among his officials, so that when a younger commissioner, second class was appointed as commissioner of Batavia, people talked about Van Oudijck having been passed over, without knowing that it had been at his own instigation. Searching for a reason, people raked up the dismissal of the Prince of Ngajiwa, and the ensuing strange happenings, but it was felt that neither was really reason enough for the government to pass over Van Oudijck.
He himself regained in the process a strange kind of calm, the calm of weariness, of letting himself go, of being stuck in his familiar Labuwangi, of going native in his provincial post, of not having to go to Batavia, where things were so completely different. When at his last audience the Governor General had mentioned a European leave, he had felt a fear of Europe — a fear of no longer feeling at home there — now he felt the same fear even of Batavia. Yet he was only too familiar with all the quasi-Western humbug of the place; he knew the capital of Java put on very European airs, and in reality was only half-European. In himself — unbeknown to his wife, who regretted the shattered illusion of Batavia — he was secretly amused that he had been able to ensure that he stayed in Labuwangi. But that amusement showed him that he was changed, aged, diminished, eyes no longer fixed on the path upward, assuming a higher and higher position in human society, which had always been the path of his life. What had happened to his ambition? How had his domineering drive slackened? He attributed everything to the effect of the climate. It would certainly be good if he could refresh his blood and his mind in Europe. But instantly that thought dissolved for want of will. No, he didn’t want to go to Europe. He was fond of the Indies. He gave himself over to long reflections, lying in an easy chair, enjoying his coffee, his airy clothes, the gentle weakening of his muscles, the aimless drowsy flow of his thoughts. The only sharp-edged element of that drowsy flow was his ever-increasing suspicion, and he would suddenly wake from his torpor and listen to the vague sound, the faint suppressed laughter that he imagined he heard from Léonie’s room, just as at night, suspicious of ghosts, he listened to the muffled sounds of the garden and the rat above his head.
BOOK VII
1
ADDY WAS SITTING with Mrs Van Does on the small back veranda of her house when they heard a carriage rattle to a halt outside. They looked at each other with a smile, and got up.
“I’ll leave you alone,” said Mrs Van Does, and she disappeared to ride around town in a dos-à-dos carriage doing business with friends.
Léonie entered.
“Where’s Mrs Van Does?” she asked, acting each time as if it were the first: that was her great attraction.
He knew this and replied: “She’s just popped out for a moment. She’ll be sorry not to have seen you…”
He spoke in this way because he knew that she liked it: each time the ceremonial beginning in order to maintain the freshness of their liaison.
They sat down on a divan in the small enclosed central gallery, he next to her.
The divan had been covered with a piece of brightly patterned cretonne; the white walls were covered with some cheap fans and Japanese scroll paintings, and on either side of a small mirror there were two imitation bronze statues on pedestals: unspecified knights, one leg forward, a spear in hand. Through the glass door the grubby rear veranda was dimly visible, the pillars greenish yellow and damp, the flowerpots also greenish yellow, with a few withered rose bushes; the damp garden beyond was overgrown, with a pair of scrawny coconut palms, their leaves drooping like snapped feathers.
He drew her into his arms, but she pushed him back gently.