The Hidden Force Part 18

And, in the most lucid moments of this play and counterplay, there was the obvious fear, the fear which she felt most definitely of all, the fear which she felt slowly approaching, she knew not whence, she knew not whither, but hovering over her head as with the thousand veils of a fate gliding through the sultry, rain-laden skies....

In these inharmonious moods, she had refrained from gathering her little clique around her, for she herself did not care to take the trouble and her friends did not understand her well enough to seek her out. They missed the cheerfulness in her which had attracted them at first. Envy and hostility were now given more rein; people began to speak freely of her: she was affected, pedantic, vain, proud; she had the pretention always to aim at being the leading person in the town; she behaved just as though she were the resident's wife and ordered every one about. She was not really pretty, she had an impossible way of dressing, her house was preposterously arranged. And then her relation with Van Helderen, their evening walks to the light-house! Ida heard about it at Tosari, amid the band of gossips at the small, poky hotel, where the visitors are bored when they are not going on excursions and therefore sit about in their poky little verandahs, almost in one another's pockets, peeping into one another's rooms, listening at the thin part.i.tions; Ida heard about it at Tosari and it was enough to rouse the little Indian woman's instincts, the instincts of a white half-caste, and induce her suddenly, without stating any cause, to remove her children from Eva's charge. Van Helderen, when he went up for the week-end, asked his wife for an explanation, asked her why she insulted Eva by taking the children away, without a reason, and having them up in the hills, thus increasing the hotel-bills. Ida made a scene, talking loudly, with hysterics that rang through the little hotel, made all the visitors p.r.i.c.k up their ears and, like a gale of wind, whipped the cackling chatter into a storm. And, without further explanation, Ida broke with Eva.

Eva withdrew into herself. Even in Surabaya, where she went to do some shopping, she heard the scandalous chatter; and she became so sick of her world and her friends that she silently shrank back into herself. She wrote to Van Helderen not to call any more. She entreated him to become reconciled with his wife. She gave up seeing him. And she was now all alone. She felt that she was not in the mood to find comfort in any one around her. There was no sympathy and no understanding in India for such moods as hers. And so she shut herself up. Her husband was working hard, as usual. But she devoted herself more zealously to her little boy, she immersed herself in her love for her child. She withdrew herself into her love for her house. Well, this was her life of never going out, of never seeing any one, of never hearing any other music than her own. This was seeking comfort in her house, her child and her books. This was the personality that she had become, after her early illusions and strivings. She now constantly felt the yearning for Europe, for Holland, for her parents, for people of artistic culture. And now it developed into hatred for the country which she had at first seen in the overwhelming grandeur of its beauty, with its majestic mountains and the softly-creeping mystery that lurked in nature and humanity. Now she hated nature and humanity; and their mystery terrified her.

She filled her life with thoughts of her child. Her boy, little Otto, was three years old. She would guide him, make a man of him. From the day of his birth she had had vague illusions of later seeing her son a great artist, by preference a great writer, famous throughout the world. But she had learnt much since then. She felt that art does not always stand supreme. She felt that there are higher things, which sometimes, in her despondency, she denied, but which were there nevertheless, radiant and great. These things had to do with the shaping of the future; these things had to do above all with peace, justice and brotherhood. Oh, the great brotherhood of the poor and the rich! Now, in her loneliness, she contemplated this as the highest ideal at which one can work, as sculptors work on a monument. Justice and peace would follow. But human brotherhood must be aimed at first; and she wished her son to work at it. Where? In Europe? In India? She did not know; she did not see it before her. She saw it in Europe rather than in India, where the inexplicable, the enigmatical, the fearful remained in the foreground of her thoughts. How strange it was, how strange!...

She was a woman made for ideals. Perhaps this by itself was the simple explanation of what she felt and feared ... in India....

"Your impressions of India are altogether mistaken," her husband would say. "You see India quite wrongly. Quiet? You think it's quiet here? Why should I have to work so hard in India, if things were quiet at Labuw.a.n.gi?... We have hundreds of interests at heart, of Europeans and Javanese alike. Agriculture is studied as eagerly in this country as anywhere. The population is increasing steadily.... Declining? A colony in which there is always so much going on? That's one of Van Helderen's imbecile ideas: speculative ideas, mere vapourings, which you just echo after him.... I can't understand the way in which you regard India nowadays.... There was a time when you had eyes for all that was beautiful and interesting here. That time seems to be past. You ought to go home for a bit, really...."

But she knew that he would be very lonely without her; and for this reason she refused to go. Later, when her boy was older, she would have to go to Holland. But by then Eldersma would certainly be an a.s.sistant-resident. At present he still had seventeen controllers and district secretaries above him. It had been going on like this for years, that looking towards promotion in the distant future. It was like yearning after a mirage. Of ever becoming a resident he did not so much as think. a.s.sistant-resident for a couple of years or so; and then to Holland, on a pension....

She thought it a heart-breaking existence, slaving one's self to death like that ... for Labuw.a.n.gi!...

She was down with malaria; and her maid, Saina, was giving her ma.s.sage, kneading her aching limbs with supple fingers.

"It's a nuisance, Saina, when I'm ill, for you to be living in the compound. You'd better move into the house this evening, with your four children."

Saina thought it troublesome, a great fuss.

"Why?"

And the woman explained. Her cottage had been left to her by her husband. She was attached to it, though it was in an utterly dilapidated condition. Now that the rainy monsoon was on, the rain often came in through the roof; and then she was unable to cook and the children had to go without their food. To have it repaired was difficult. She had a rix-dollar a week from the mem-sahib. Sixty cents of that went on rice. Then there were a few cents daily for fish, coconut oil, betel-pepper; a few cents for fuel.... No, repairs were out of the question. She would be much better off with the mem-sahib, much better off on the estate. But it would be such a fuss to find a tenant for the cottage, because it was so dilapidated; and the mem-sahib knew that no house was allowed to remain unoccupied in the compound: there was a heavy fine attached to that.... So she would rather go on living in her damp cottage. She could easily stay and sit up with the mem-sahib at night; her eldest girl would look after the little ones.

And, resigned to her small existence of petty miseries, Saina pa.s.sed her supple fingers, with a firm, gentle pressure, over her mistress'

ailing limbs.

And Eva thought it heart-rending, this living on a rix-dollar a week, with four children, in a house which let in the rain, so that it was impossible to cook there.

"Let me look after your second little daughter, Saina," said Eva, a day or two after.

Saina hesitated, smiled: she would rather not, but dared not say so.

"Yes," Eva insisted, "let her come to me: you will see her all day long; she will sleep in cook's room; I shall provide her clothes; and she will have nothing to do but to see that my room is kept tidy. You can teach her that."

"So young still, mem-sahib; only just ten."

"No, no," Eva insisted. "Let me do this to help you. What's her name?"

"Mina, mem-sahib."

"Mina? That won't do," said Eva. "That's the seamstress' name. We'll find another for her."

Saina brought the child, looking very shy, with a streak of moist rice-powder on her forehead; and Eva dressed her prettily. She was a very attractive little thing, with a soft brown skin covered with a downy bloom, and looked charming in her new clothes. She sedulously piled the sarongs in the press, with fragrant white flowers between the layers: the flowers were changed for fresh ones daily. For a joke, because she arranged the flowers so prettily, Eva called her Melati, after the East-Indian jasmine.

Two days later, Saina crouched down before her njonja.

"What is it, Saina?"

Might the little girl come back to the damp cottage in the compound? Saina asked.

"Why?" asked Eva, in amazement. "Isn't your little girl happy here?"

Yes, she was, said Saina, bashfully, but she preferred the cottage. The mem-sahib was very kind, but little Mina would rather be in the cottage.

Eva was angry and let the child go home, with the new clothes, which Saina took away with her as a matter of course.

"Why wasn't the child allowed to stay?" Eva asked of the latta cook.

Cook at first dared not say.

"Come, cook, why wasn't she?" asked Eva, insisting.

"Because the mem-sahib called the little girl Melati.... Names of flowers and fruits ... are given only ... to dancing-girls,"

explained the cook, as though expounding a mystery.

"But why didn't Saina tell me?" asked Eva, greatly incensed. "I had not the least idea of that!"

"Too shy," said cook, by way of excusing Saina. "Beg pardon, mem-sahib."

These were trivial incidents in the daily domestic life, little episodes of her housekeeping; but they made her feel sore, because she felt behind them as it were a wall that always existed between her and the people and things of India. She did not know the country, she would never know the people.

And the minor disappointment of the episodes filled her with the same soreness as the greater disappointment of her illusions, because her life, amid the daily trivialities of her housekeeping, was itself becoming more and more trivial.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The early hours of the day were often cool, washed clean by the abundant rains; and in the young suns.h.i.+ne of these morning hours the earth emitted a tender haze, a blue softening of every hard line and colour, so that the Lange Laan, with its villa-residences and fenced gardens, seemed to be surrounded with the vagueness and beauty of a dream-avenue: the dream-columns rose insubstantially, like a vision of pillared tranquillity; the lines of the roofs acquired distinction in their indefiniteness; the hues of the trees and the outlines of their leafy tops were etherealized into tender pastels of misty rose and even mistier blue, with a single brighter gleam of morning yellow and a distant purple streak of dawn. And over all this matutinal world fell a cool dew, like a fountain that rose from that drenched ground and fell back in pearly drops in the child-like gentleness of the first sunbeams. It was as though every morning the earth and her people were newly created, as though mankind were newly born to a youth of innocence and paradisal unconsciousness. But the illusion of the dawn lasted but a minute, barely a few moments: the sun, rising higher in the sky, shone forth from the virginal mist; boastfully it unfurled its proud halo of piercing rays, pouring down its burning gold, full of G.o.dlike pride because it was reigning over its brief moment of the day, for the clouds were already mustering, greyly advancing, like battle-hordes of dark phantoms, pressing eerily onwards: deep bluish-black and heavy lead-grey phantoms, overmastering the sun and crus.h.i.+ng the earth under white torrents of rain. And the evening twilight, short and hurried, letting fall veil upon veil of c.r.a.pe, was like an overwhelming melancholy of earth, nature and life, in which one forgot that paradisal moment of the morning; the white rain rustled down like a flood-tide of melancholy; the road and the gardens were dripping, drinking up the falling torrents until they shone like marshy pools and flooded meadows in the dusky evening; a chill, spectral mist rose on high with a slow movement as of ghostly draperies, which hovered over the puddles; and the chilly houses, scantily lit with their smoking lamps, round which clouds of insects swarmed, falling on every hand and dying with singed wings, became filled with a yet chillier sadness, an over-shadowing fear of the menacing world out of doors, of the all-powerful cloud-hordes, of the boundless immensity that came whispering on the gusty winds from the far-off unknown, high as the heavens, wide as the firmament, against which the open houses appeared unprotected, while the inmates were small and petty for all their civilization and science and soulful feelings, small as wriggling insects, insignificant, abandoned to the play of the giant mysteries blowing up from the distance.

Leonie van Oudijck, in the half-lit back-verandah of the residency, was talking to Theo in a soft voice: and Oorip squatted beside her.

"It's nonsense, Oorip!" she cried, peevishly.

"Really not, mem-sahib," said the maid. "It's not nonsense. I hear them every evening."

"Where?" asked Theo.

"In the banyan-tree behind the house, high up, in the top branches."

"It's wild cats," said Theo.

"It's not wild cats, sahib," the maid insisted. "Come, come! As if Oorip didn't know how wild cats mew! Kriow, kriow: that's how they go. What we hear every night is the ghosts. It's the little children crying in the trees. The souls of the little children, crying in the trees."