The Hidden Force Part 10

"Come, we'd better go!" said Eva to Frans. "Else she'll be breaking my eggs presently. "Out of this, cook, outside!"

"Out of this, outside!" echoed the latta cook. "Oh, mem sahib, beg pardon, mem sahib, oh, enough, enough, mem sahib!"

"Come and sit down for a little," said Eva to Van Helderen.

He went with her:

"You're so cheerful," he said.

"Aren't you?"

"No, I've been feeling sad, lately."

"I too. I told you so yesterday. It's something in the Labuw.a.n.gi air. There's no telling what this table-turning has in store for us."

They sat down in the back verandah. He sighed.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"I can't help it," he said. "I care for you so. I love you."

She was silent for an instant.

"Again?" she then said, reproachfully.

He did not answer.

"I have told you, mine is not a pa.s.sionate nature. I am cold. I love my husband and my child. Let's be friends, Van Helderen."

"I'm fighting against it; but it's no use."

"I'm fond of Ida; I wouldn't make her unhappy for the world."

"I don't believe I was ever fond of her."

"Van Helderen!..."

"If I was, it was only for her pretty face. But white though Ida may be, she's a half-caste ... with her whimsies and her childish little tragedies. I didn't see it so much at first, but I see it now, of course. I'd met women from Europe before I met you. But you were a revelation to me, a revelation of all the charm and artistic grace that a woman can possess.... And the exotic side in you appeals to my own exotic side."

"I value your friends.h.i.+p highly. Let things remain as they are."

"Sometimes it's just as though I were mad, sometimes I dream ... that we're travelling in Europe together, that we're in Italy or Paris. Sometimes I see us sitting together over a fire, in a room of our own, you talking of art, I of the modern, social developments of our time. But, after that, I see us together ... more intimately...."

"Van Helderen!..."

"It's no longer any use your warning me. I love you, Eva, Eva...."

"I don't believe there's another country where there's so much love going about as in India! I suppose it's the heat...."

"Don't crush me with your sarcasm. No other woman ever made such an appeal to my whole soul and body as you do, Eva...."

She shrugged her shoulders:

"Don't be angry, Van Helderen, but I can't stand these commonplaces. Let us be sensible. I have a charming husband, you have a dear little wife. We're all good, pleasant friends together."

"You're so cold!"

"I don't want to spoil the happiness of our friends.h.i.+p."

"Friends.h.i.+p!"

"Friends.h.i.+p is what I said. There is nothing I value so highly, except my domestic happiness. I couldn't live without friends. I am happy in my husband and my child; next to these I need friends, above all things."

"So that they can admire you, so that you can rule over them!" said he, angrily.

She looked him in the face:

"Perhaps," she said, coolly. "Perhaps I have a need of admiration and of ruling over others. We all have our weaknesses."

"I have mine," he said, bitterly.

"Come," she said, in a kinder tone, "let us remain friends."

"I am terribly unhappy," he said, in a dull voice. "I feel as if I had missed everything in life. I have never been out of Java and I feel there's something lacking in me because I have never seen ice and snow. Snow: I think of it as a sort of mysterious unknown purity, which I long for, but which I never seem to meet. When shall I see Europe? When shall I cease to rave about Il Trovatore and manage to visit Bayreuth? When shall I come within range of you, Eva? I'm feeling for everything with my antennae, like a wingless insect.... What is my life?... With Ida, with three children, whom I foresee growing up like their mother!... I shall remain controller for years and then--possibly--be promoted to a.s.sistant-resident ... and so remain. And then at last I shall receive my dismissal--or ask for it--and go to Sukab.u.mi to live, to vegetate on a small pension. I feel everything in me longing for idleness...."

"You like your work, for all that; you're a first-rate official. Eldersma always says that in India a man who doesn't work and who doesn't love his work is lost."

"Your nature is not made for love and mine is not made for work: not for that and nothing else. I can work for an aim that I see before me, a beautiful aim; but I can't work ... just for work's sake and to fill the emptiness in my life."

"Your aim is India...."

"A fine phrase," he said. "It may be so for a man like the resident, who has succeeded in his career and who never has to sit studying the Colonial List and calculating on the illness of this man or the death of that ... so that he may get promoted. It's all right for a man like Van Oudijck, who, in his genuine, honest idealism, thinks that his aim is India, not because of Holland, but because of India herself, because of the native whom he, the official, protects against the tyranny of the landlords and planters. I am more cynical by nature...."

"But don't be so lukewarm about India. It's not merely a fine phrase: I feel like that myself. India is our whole greatness, the greatness of us Hollanders. Listen to foreigners speaking of India: they are all enchanted with her glory, with our methods of colonization.... Don't have anything to do with the wretched Dutch spirit of our people at home, who know nothing about India, who always have a sneering word for India, who are so petty and stiff and bourgeois and narrow-minded...."

"I didn't know that you were so enthusiastic about India. Only yesterday you were full of wretched anxieties, and I was standing up for my country...."

"Oh, it gives me a sort of shudder, the mystery in the evenings, when something seems to threaten I don't know what! I'm afraid of the future; there's danger ahead of us!... I feel that I, personally, am still very remote from India, though I don't want to be; that I miss the art amid which I was educated; that I miss here, in our everyday life, the plastic beauty which both my parents always pointed out to me.... But I am not unjust. And I think that India, as our colony, is great; I think that we, in our colony, are great...."

"Formerly, perhaps it was so. Nowadays, everything is going wrong; nowadays, we are no longer great. You have an artistic nature; you are always looking for artistic perfection in India, though you seldom find it. And then your mind is confronted with that greatness, that glory. That's the poetry of it. The prose of it is a gigantic but exhausted colony, still governed from Holland with one idea: the pursuit of gain. The reality is not an India under a great ruler, but an India under a petty, mean-souled blood-sucker; the country sucked dry; and the real population--not the Hollander, who spends his Indian money at The Hague, but the population, the native population, attached to the native soil--oppressed by the disdain of its overlord, who once improved it with his own blood, and now threatening to revolt against this oppression and disdain.... You, as an artist, feel the danger approaching, vaguely, like a cloud in the sky, in the Indian night; I see the danger as something very real, something rising--before Holland--if not from America and j.a.pan, then out of the soil of India herself...."

She smiled:

"I like you when you talk like this," she said. "I should end by falling in with your views."

"If I could achieve that by talking!" he laughed, bitterly, getting up. "My half hour is over: the resident is expecting me and he doesn't like waiting a minute. Goodbye ... and forgive me."

"Tell me," she said, "am I a flirt?"