Читать книгу The Hidden Force - Louis Couperus - Страница 8

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Van Oudijck, in a pleasant mood because of his wife and children, suggested a drive; and the horses were put to the landau. Van Oudijck had a pleased and jovial look, under the broad, gold-laced peak of his cap. Léonie, seated beside him, was wearing a new mauve muslin frock, from Batavia, and a hat with mauve poppies. A lady’s hat in the up-country districts is a luxury, a colossal elegance; and Doddie, facing her, but dressed inland fashion, without a hat, was secretly vexed and thought that mamma might just as well have told her she was going to “take” a hat, to use Doddie’s idiom. She now looked such a contrast to mamma; she couldn’t stand them now, those softly swaying poppies. Of the boys, René was with them, in a clean white suit. The chief messenger sat on the box beside the coachman, holding against his side the great golden umbrella, the symbol of authority. It was past six, it was already growing dark; and over Labuwangi there hung at this hour the velvety silence, the tragic mystery of the twilit atmosphere that marked the days of the eastern monsoon. Sometimes a dog barked, or a wood-pigeon cooed, breaking the unreality of the silence, as of a deserted town. But now there was also the rattle of the carriage driving right through the silence; and the horses stamped the silence into tiny shreds. No other carriages were met; an absence of all signs of human life cast a spell upon the gardens and verandahs. A couple of young men on foot, in white, took off their hats.

The carriage had left the wealthier part of the town and entered the Chinese quarter, where the lights were burning in the little shops. Business was almost finished: the Chinamen were resting, in all sorts of limp attitudes, with their legs dangling or crossed, their arms round their heads, their pigtails loose or twisted around their skulls. When the carriage approached, they rose and remained standing respectfully. The Javanese for the most part—those who were well brought up and knew their manners—squatted. Along the road stood the little portable kitchens, lit by small paraffin lamps, of the drink-vendors and pastry-sellers. The motley colours showed dingy in the evening darkness, lit by innumerable little lamps. The Chinese shops, crammed with goods, displayed red and gold signboards and red and gold placards with inscriptions; in the background was the domestic altar with the sacred print; the white god seated, with the black god grimacing behind him. But the street widened, became suddenly more considerable: rich Chinese houses loomed white in the dusk; the most striking was the gleaming, palatial villa of an immensely wealthy retired opium-factor, who had made his money in the days before the opium monopoly: a gleaming palace of graceful stucco-work with numberless outbuildings. The porticos of the verandah were in a monumental style of imposing elegance and in many soft shades of gold; in the depth of the open house the immense domestic altar was visible, with the print of the gods conspicuously illuminated; the garden was laid out with conventional winding paths, but beautifully filled with square pots and tall vases of dark blue-and-green glazed porcelain, containing dwarf trees, handed down as heirlooms from father to son; and all was kept with a radiant cleanliness, a careful neatness of detail, eloquent of the prosperous, spick-and-span luxury of a Chinese opium-millionaire. But not all the Chinese houses were so ostentatiously open: most of them lay hidden with closed doors in high-walled gardens, tucked away in the secrecy of their domestic life.

But suddenly the houses came to an end and Chinese graves stretched along a broad road, rich graves, each grassy mound with a stone entrance—the door of death—raised in the form of the symbol of fecundity—the door of life—and all surrounded with a wide space of turf, to the great vexation of Van Oudijck, who reckoned out how much ground was lost to cultivation by these burial-places of the wealthy Chinese. And the Chinese seemed to triumph in life and death in this mysterious town which was otherwise so silent; the Chinese gave it its real character of busy traffic, of trade, of money-making, of living and dying; for, when the carriage drove into the Arab quarter—a district of ordinary houses, but gloomy, lacking in style, with life and prosperity hidden away behind closed doors; with chairs in the verandah, but the master of the house gloomily sitting cross-legged on the floor, following the carriage with a black look—this quarter seemed even more mysterious than the fashionable part of Labuwangi and seemed to radiate its unutterable mystery like an atmosphere of Islam that spread over the whole town, as though it were Islam that had poured forth the dusky, fatal melancholy of resignation which filled the shuddering, noiseless evening. … They did not feel this in their rattling carriage, accustomed to that atmosphere as they were from childhood and no longer sensitive to the gloomy secret that was like the approach of a dark force which had always breathed upon them, the foreign rulers with their creole blood, so that they should never suspect it. Perhaps, when Van Oudijck now and again read about Pan-Islam in the newspapers, he was dimly conscious in his deepest thoughts of this dark force, this gloomy secret. But at moments like the present—driving with his wife and children, amidst the rattling of his carriage and the trampling of his fine Walers; the messenger with the furled umbrella, which glittered like a furled sun, on the box—he was too intensely aware of his individuality, his authoritative, overbearing nature, to feel anything of the dark secret, to divine anything of the black peril. And he was now in far too pleasant a mood to feel or see anything melancholy. In his optimism he did not see even the decline of his town, which he loved; he was not struck, as they drove past, by the immense porticoed villas, the witnesses to the prosperity of former planters, now deserted, neglected, standing in grounds that had run wild, one of them taken over by a timber-felling company, which allowed the foreman to live in it and stacked the logs in the front-garden. The deserted houses gleamed sadly with their pillared porticos, which, amid the desolate grounds, loomed spectral in the moonlight, like temples of evil. But they did not see it like that: enjoying the rocking of the smooth carriage-springs, Léonie smiled and dozed; and Doddie, now that they were approaching the Lange Laan again, looked out to see whether she could catch sight of Addie. …