Читать книгу The Hidden Force - Louis Couperus - Страница 6

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Léonie Van Oudijck always enjoyed her siesta. She only slept for a moment, but she loved after lunch to be alone in her cool bedroom till five or half-past five. She read a little, mostly the magazines from the circulating library, but as a rule she did nothing but dream. Her dreams were vague imaginings, which rose before her as in an azure mist during her afternoons of solitude. Nobody knew of them and she kept them very secret, like a secret vice, a sin. She committed herself much more readily—to the world—where her liaisons were concerned. These never lasted long; they counted for little in her life; she never wrote letters; and the favours which she granted afforded the recipient no privileges in the daily intercourse of society. Hers was a silent, correct depravity, both physical and moral. For her imaginings too, despite their poetical insipidity, were depraved. Her pet author was Catulle Mendès: she loved all those little flowers of azure sentimentality, those rosy, affected little cupids, with one little finger in the air and their legs gracefully hovering around the most vicious themes and motives of perverted passion. In her bedroom hung a few engravings: a young woman lying on a lace-covered bed and being kissed by two sportive angels; another: a lion with an arrow through its breast at the feet of a smiling maiden; lastly, a large coloured advertisement of some scent or other: a sort of floral nymph whose veils were being drawn on either side by playful little cherubs, of the kind which we see on soap-boxes. This “picture” in particular she thought splendid; she could imagine nothing with a greater æsthetic appeal. She knew that the plate was monstrous, but she had never been able to prevail upon herself to take the horrible thing down, though it was looked at askance by everybody: her friends, her step-children, all of whom walked in and out of her room with the Indian casualness which makes no secret of the toilet. She could stare at it for minutes on end, as though bewitched; she thought it perfectly charming; and her own dreams resembled this print. She also treasured a chocolate-box with a keepsake picture on it, as the type of beauty which she admired, even above her own: the pink flush on the cheeks, the brown eyes under unconvincing golden hair, the bosom showing through the lace. But she never committed herself in respect of this absurdity, which she vaguely suspected; she never spoke of these prints and boxes, just because she knew that actually they were hideous. But she thought them lovely; for her they were delightful, were artistic and poetical.

These were her happiest hours.

Here, at Labuwangi, she dared not do what she did in Batavia; and here, at Labuwangi, people hardly believed what people in Batavia said. Nevertheless, Mrs. van Does averred that this resident and that inspector—the one travelling for his pleasure, the other on an official circuit—staying for a few days at the residency, had found their way in the afternoon, during the siesta, to Léonie’s bedroom. But all the same at Labuwangi any such actual occurrences were the rarest of interludes between Mrs. van Oudijck’s rosy afternoon visions.

Still, this afternoon it seemed as though, after dozing a little while and after all the dullness caused by the journey and the heat had cleared away from her milk-white complexion—it seemed, now that she was looking at the romping angels of the scent-advertisement, that her thoughts were no longer dwelling on those rosy, tender, doll-like forms, but as though she were listening to the sounds outside. …

She was wearing nothing but a sarong, which she had pulled up under her arms and hitched in a twist across her breast. Her beautiful fair hair hung loose. Her pretty little white feet were bare: she had not even put on her slippers. And she looked through the slats of the shutters.

Between the flower-pots, which, standing on the side steps of the house, masked her windows with great masses of foliage, she could see an annexe consisting of four rooms, the spare-rooms, one of which was Theo’s.

She stood peering for a moment and then set the shutter ajar. And she saw that the shutter of Theo’s room also opened a little way. …

Then she smiled; she knotted her sarong more closely and lay down upon the bed again.

She listened.

In a moment she heard the gravel grating slightly under the pressure of a slipper. Her shutters, without being closed, were drawn to. A hand now opened them cautiously. …

She looked round smiling:

“What is it, Theo?” she asked.

He came nearer. He was dressed in pyjamas and he sat on the edge of the bed and played with her soft white hands and suddenly he kissed her fiercely.

At that instant a stone whizzed through the bedroom.

They both started, looked up, and in a moment were both standing in the middle of the room.

“Who threw that?” she asked.

“One of the boys, perhaps,” he said: “René or Ricus, playing about outside.”

“They aren’t up yet.”

“Or something may have fallen from above. …”

“But it was thrown. …”

“A stone so often gets loose. …”

“But this is gravel.”

She picked up the little stone. He looked outside cautiously:

“It’s nothing, Léonie. It must really have fallen out of the gutter … and then bounced up again. It’s nothing.”

“I’m frightened,” she murmured.

He laughed almost aloud and asked:

“But why?”

They had nothing to fear. The room lay between Léonie’s boudoir and two large spare-rooms, which were reserved exclusively for residents, generals and other highly-placed officials. On the other side of the middle gallery were Van Oudijck’s rooms—his office and his bedroom—and Doddie’s room and the room of the boys, Ricus and René. Léonie was therefore isolated in her wing, between the spare-rooms. It made her cynically insolent. At this hour, the grounds were quite deserted. For that matter, she was not afraid of the servants. Oorip was wholly to be trusted and often received handsome presents: sarongs; a gold clasp; a long diamond kabaai-pin, which she wore as a jewelled silver plaque on her breast. As Léonie never grumbled, was generous in advancing wages and displayed an apparently easy-going temperament—although everything always happened as she wished—she was not disliked; and, whatever the servants might know about her, they had never yet betrayed her. It made her all the more insolent. A curtain hung before a passage between her bedroom and boudoir; and it was arranged, once and for all, between Theo and Léonie, that at the least danger he would slip away quietly behind this hanging, go out through the garden-door of the boudoir and pretend to be looking at the rose-trees in the pots on the steps. This would make it appear as though he had just come from his own room and were merely inspecting the roses. The inner doors of the boudoir and bedroom were usually locked, because Léonie declared frankly that she did not like to be interrupted unawares.

She liked Theo, because of his fresh youthfulness. And here, at Labuwangi, he was her only vice, not counting a passing inspector and the little pink angels. The two were now like naughty children; they laughed silently, in each other’s arms. It was past four by this time; and they heard the voices of René and Ricus in the garden. They were taking possession of the grounds for the holidays. They were thirteen and fourteen years old; and they revelled in the garden. They ran about barefoot, in blue striped pyjamas, and went to look at the horses, at the pigeons; they teased Doddie’s cockatoo, which tripped about on the roof of the outhouses. They had a tame squirrel. They hunted geckos, those large-headed lizards, which they shot with a blow-pipe, to the great vexation of the servants, because the geckos bring luck. They bought roasted monkey-nuts at the gate of a passing Chinaman and then mocked him, imitating his accent, his difficulty with his r’s:

“Loasted monkey-nuts! … Chinaman kaput!”

They climbed into the flamboyant and swung in the branches like monkeys. They flung stones at the cats; they incited the neighbour’s dogs to bark themselves hoarse and bite one another’s ears to pieces. They splashed about with the water in the pond, made themselves unpresentable with mud and dirt and dared to pluck the Victoria Regias, which was strictly forbidden. They tested the bearing-power of the flat, green Victoria-leaves, which looked like tea-trays, and tried to stand on them and tumbled in. Then they took empty bottles, set them in a row and bowled at them with rounded flints. Then, with bamboos, they fished up all sorts of unspeakable floating things from the ditch beside the house and threw them at each other. Their inventive fancy was inexhaustible; and the hour of the siesta was their special hour. They had caught a gecko and a cat and were making them fight each other; the gecko opened its jaws, which were like a small crocodile’s, and hypnotized the cat, which slunk away, withdrawing from its enemy’s beady, black eyes, arching its back and bristling with terror. And after that the boys ate themselves ill with unripe mangoes.

Léonie and Theo had watched the fight between the cat and gecko through the slats of the shutter and now saw the boys quietly eating the unripe mangoes on the grass. But it was now the hour when the prisoners, twelve in number, worked in the grounds, under the supervision of a dignified old native overseer, with a little cane in his hand. They fetched water in tubs and watering-cans made out of paraffin-tins, sometimes in the actual paraffin-tins themselves, and watered the plants, the grass and the gravel. Then they swept the grounds with a loud rustle of coco-nut-fibre brooms.

René and Ricus, behind the overseer’s back, for they were afraid of him, threw half-eaten mangoes at the prisoners and called them names and made faces and grimaces at them. Doddie appeared after her nap, carrying her cockatoo on her wrist. It cried, “Kaka! Ka-ka!” and raised its yellow crest with swift movements of its neck.

And Theo now stole behind the curtain into the boudoir, and, at a moment when the boys were running and bombarding each other with mangoes, and when Doddie was strolling towards the pond with the loitering gait and the swing of the hips peculiar to the Creole, he came from behind the plants, smelling at the roses and behaving as though he had been walking in the garden before going to take his bath.