The Hidden Force

T
HE FULL MOON
, which that evening had a tragic intensity, had risen early, just before twilight faded, like a huge, blood-red globe. It flared sunset-like low beyond the tamarind trees of Long Avenue and climbed, gradually purging itself of its tragic hue, into an indistinct sky. A deathly hush pervaded everything like a veil of silence, as if, after the long afternoon siesta, the evening’s rest were beginning without any transition. Over the town, its white-pillared detached houses hidden among the tree-lined avenues and gardens, there hung a muffled silence in the oppressiveness of the evening air, without a breath of wind, as if the lustreless evening were wearied by the scorching east monsoon day. The houses nestled silently amid the vegetation, with their regularly looming ranks of large whitewashed flowerpots. Here and there lights were already being lit. Suddenly a dog barked and another dog answered, tearing the muffled silence into long, coarse shreds; the angry dogs—hoarse, breathless, gruffly hostile—suddenly they too fell silent.

At the end of Long Avenue lay the district commissioner’s mansion, set deep behind its front garden. Straight out of the blackness of the giant banyan trees its low lines of tiled
roofs zigzagged their way one after the other towards the shadow of the rear garden, casting a primitive outline over a patchwork of rooms and verandas to form a single silhouette. At the front, however, rose the white columns of the portico, dazzlingly bright and substantial, widely spaced, open and welcoming with the expansiveness of an imposing palace gate. Through the open doors the central gallery extended backwards, illuminated by an occasional flickering lamp.

A native attendant lit the lanterns at the side of the house. Semicircles of large white pots containing roses and
chrysanthemums
, palms and caladiums fanned out left and right in a wide arc from the front to the side of the house. A broad gravel path formed the drive up to the white-columned portico; there was a wide, arid expanse of lawn surrounded by pots, and in the middle of it, on a brick pedestal, was a monumental vase containing a large latania. A green
freshness
was provided by the winding pond, where the huge leaves of a Victoria regia rubbed shoulders like round, dark-green trays, with the occasional splash of white from a lotus-like flower among them. A path wound along the edge of the pond, and in a round shingle-covered area stood a tall flag pole. The flag had already been lowered, as it was every day at six. A simple gate divided the grounds from Long Avenue.

The huge compound was silent. A single lamp from the candelabra on the front veranda, and another inside turned down low, had now slowly begun to burn, having been laboriously lit by the lamp boy as two night lights in the palace of columns and receding roofs, its perspective like that
of a child’s drawing. On the steps of the office sat several attendants in dark uniforms, talking in whispers. After a while one of them got up and, with the leisurely gait of one not wishing to hurry, headed towards a bronze bell hanging high up, near the attendants’ shed at the very edge of the compound. He reached the bell after a hundred paces and rang seven slowly echoing strokes. The clanger reverberated with a brazen note, each stroke followed by a zigzagging boom. The dogs’ barking began again. The attendant, supple and boyishly slim in his blue linen jacket and trousers with yellow facings, cuffs and collar, calmly retraced his hundred steps back to the other attendants.

The light had now been turned on in the office and in the adjoining bedroom, where a faint glow penetrated through the blinds. The District Commissioner, a large thick-set man in a black jacket and white trousers, walked through the office and called outside:

“Attendant!”

The head attendant, in his linen uniform jacket, its tails edged with a wide yellow hem, approached on bended knees and crouched down…

“Call the
nyonya
, your mistress!”

“The
nyonya
has gone out,
kanjeng
!” whispered the man, and with both hands, fingers touching, he made the respectful sign of the
semba
.

“Where has the mistress gone to?”

“I haven’t checked yet, master!” said the man, as an excuse for not knowing, and again made the sign of the
semba
.

The District Commissioner thought for a moment.

“My cap,” he said. “My cane.”

The head attendant, his knees still bent in dutiful respect, scuttled across the room and in a crouching position offered the semi-formal uniform cap and a walking stick.

The Commissioner went out, the head attendant hurrying after him holding a long burning wick, the glowing tip of which he swung in order to identify the Commissioner to anyone passing by in the dark. The Commissioner walked slowly across the compound and onto Long Avenue. Along that avenue, like a row of tamarind trees and flamboyants, were the villas of the principal local dignitaries, faintly lit, deathly quiet, seemingly unoccupied, with the lines of
white-washed
flowerpots glowing in the dim evening light.

The Commissioner walked first past the secretary’s house; then a girls’ school on the other side; then the notary’s office, a hotel, the post office and the home of the president of the criminal court. At the end of Long Avenue was the Catholic church, and farther on, across the river bridge, was the station. Outside the station was a large European shop, better illuminated than the others. The moon, having climbed higher and turning a brighter silver as it rose, shone down on the white bridge, the white shop, the white church: all this around a small, treeless square with a small, pointed monument—the municipal clock—at its centre.

The Commissioner met no one; the occasional Javanese, moving through the darkness, appeared momentarily from the shadows, causing the attendant to swing the glowing
tip of his wick ostentatiously behind his master. Usually the Javanese understood and cowered to one side of the road. Sometimes, out of ignorance, fresh from his village, he failed to understand and walked anxiously by, looking apprehensively at the attendant, who kept on swinging and as he passed snapped a curse at him, because he—yokel as he was—had no manners. If a carriage or a trap approached, he again swung his shooting star through the evening,
signalling
to the coachman, who either stopped and alighted, or crouched in his vehicle, and while crouching steered towards the very edge of the road.

The Commissioner walked on gloomily, with a steady, determined pace. He turned right off the small square and walked past the Dutch Reformed Church, straight towards an attractive villa with slim, fairly accurate Ionic plaster columns and brightly lit with paraffin lamps set in a candelabra. It was the Concordia club. A few servants in short, tight-fitting white jackets were sitting on the steps. A European in a white suit, the landlord, was walking about the front veranda. But there was no one around the large drinks table and the broad wicker chairs spread their arms as if waiting in vain.

The landlord bowed on seeing the Commissioner, who touched his cap briefly, passed the club and turned left. He walked to the end of the avenue, past dark little cottages hidden away in small compounds, turned again and walked along the mouth of the river. Proa after proa lay moored there, like on a canal; a monotonous buzz of Maduran seamen droned slowly across the water, from which a fishy odour
rose. Passing the harbourmaster’s office, the Commissioner continued towards the pier, which extended some way into the sea, and at the tip of which the iron candelabra shape of a small lighthouse, like a miniature Eiffel Tower, rose up. Here the District Commissioner stopped and breathed in deeply. The wind had suddenly got up, the east monsoon wind blowing from afar, as it did every day at that hour. But suddenly, unexpectedly, it stopped, subsided, as if flapping its wings in vain. The choppy sea smoothed its moon-white curls of foam and, momentarily, became a long, pale
phosphorescent
expanse.

Across the sea, the sad and monotonous drone of singing approached like a great nocturnal bird, and a fishing proa with a high, curved prow—giving it the look of a ship from antiquity—glided into the waterway. A melancholy, stoical acceptance of all the petty, dark, earthly things under that endless sky, on the shore of that sea of phosphorescent distances, drifted about and conjured a disturbing mystery…

Perhaps the tall, robust man who stood there, feet apart, breathing deeply and slowly in time with the incoming gusts of wind, tired from his work, from sitting at his desk, from his calculations regarding currency reform—the abolition of the smallest denomination of coins, entrusted to him personally by the Governor-General as an important matter—perhaps that tall, robust man, practical, cool-headed, decisive from the long-term exercise of authority did not feel that obscure mystery drifting over the Indies town that evening—his district capital—but he did feel a longing for tenderness.
He felt the vague longing for a child’s arm around his neck, for small, high-pitched voices around him. He longed for a young, smiling wife to be waiting for him. He didn’t analyse that sentimentality in himself, he was not given to
introspection
: he was too busy for that. His days were too full and varied for him to be able to give in to what he knew were fits of weakness: the suppressed impulses of his young years. But though he didn’t reflect, the mood was impossible to shake off, like a pressure on his broad chest, like a disease of tenderness, a malaise of sentimentality in his otherwise very practical mind, that of a senior official who liked his work, his area, and was committed to its interests, and for whom the almost autonomous authority of his position was totally in keeping with his domineering nature; who with his powerful lungs was just as accustomed to breathing the atmosphere of his extensive responsibilities and broad field of varied tasks as he was to breathing the wind from the open sea. That evening in particular, the longing and nostalgia filled him completely. He felt lonely, not just because of the isolation that almost always surrounds a chief regional officer, who is approached either with conventional, smiling deference, for the sake of conversation, or with succinct, businesslike respect. Although he was the head of a family, he was lonely. He thought of his big house, his wife and children. And he felt lonely, sustained only by the importance he attached to his work. It was everything to him and filled all his waking hours. He fell asleep thinking about it and his first thought on waking was of some matter concerning the district.

At that moment, tired of figures, breathing deeply in the wind, he inhaled with the freshness of the sea its
melancholy
, the mysterious poignancy of the seas of the Indies, the haunting sadness of the seas of Java; the ruefulness, the melancholy that comes rushing from afar as if borne on mysterious wings. But his nature was not the kind to
surrender
itself to mystery. He denied it. There was no such thing: there was only the freshness of the sea and the wind. There was only the scent of fish and flowers and seaweed: an odour dispersed on the wind. There was only a moment’s respite, and whatever mysterious gloom he felt nevertheless creeping irresistibly that evening into his rather susceptible mind—which he thought concerned his family circle, which he would have liked to see more tightly-knit—gathered more closely around him as father and husband. If there was any melancholy, it stemmed from that. It didn’t come from the sea or from afar through the air. He did not give in to his very first sensation of strangeness… Instead he planted himself more firmly, threw out his chest, raised his stalwart, military head, and sniffed the air.

The head attendant, squatting with his glowing wick in his hand, peered intently at his master, as if asking what he’s doing standing there so oddly by the lighthouse… So odd, those Dutch… What’s he thinking?… Why is he acting like that?… At this hour, in this of all places… The sea spirits are out and about now. There are crocodiles under the water, and every crocodile is a ghost… Look, someone had made a sacrifice to them, banana and rice and dried meat and a
hard-boiled egg on a raft of bamboo, down at the base of the lighthouse… What is His Lordship,
kanjeng
tuan
, doing here now?… It’s not good, it bodes misfortune.

The attendant’s spying eyes ranged up and down across the broad back of his master, who just stood there and gazed… What was he gazing at?… What could he see being borne on the wind?… So strange, those Dutch, strange…

The Commissioner suddenly turned round and walked back, and the startled attendant followed him, blowing on the tip of his burning wick. The Commissioner returned the way he had come; there was now a gentleman sitting in the club, who greeted him, and a few young men were walking along Long Avenue. The dogs were barking.

As the Commissioner approached the entrance of his
official
compound he saw two white figures, a man and a girl, ahead of him at the other entrance, who vanished, however, into the blackness under the banyan trees. He went straight to his office, where he handed another attendant his cap and stick. He immediately sat down at his desk. He could fit an hour’s work in before dinner.