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.
2
SEVERAL LAMPS HAD BEEN LIT. In fact the lamps had been lit everywhere, but in the long, wide galleries there was scarcely any light. In the grounds and in the house there must have been at least twenty or thirty paraffin lamps in candelabras and lanterns, but they gave no more than a dim glow, a yellow haze that spread through the house. A stream of moonlight flowed into the garden, illuminating the flowerpots and casting a sparkle across the pond. Against the bright sky the banyans stood out like soft velvet…
The first gong for dinner had sounded. On the front veranda a young man was swaying back and forth on a rocking chair, hands behind his head, bored. A young girl hummed to herself as she walked down the central gallery as if in expectation. The house was furnished in the conventional manner of commissioners’ residences in the interior, grand and banal. The marble floor of the front veranda was white and as glossy as a mirror; tall potted palms were positioned between the pillars; rocking chairs were arrayed around marble tables. In the first inner gallery, which ran parallel to the front veranda, rows of chairs stood against the wall, as if for an eternal reception. The end of the second inner gallery, which ran from front to back, at the point where it again widened into a gallery running from side to side, was marked by a huge red satin curtain hanging from a gold cornice. In the white wall spaces between the doors of the rooms hung either gold-framed mirrors on marble consoles, or lithographs — paintings as they were called in the Indies: Van Dyck on horseback, Veronese received by a doge on the steps of a Venetian palace, Shakespeare at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, and Tasso at the Este court. But the largest space was occupied by a huge etching in a frame topped by the royal coat of arms: a portrait of Queen Wilhelmina in her coronation regalia. In the centre of the central gallery was a red satin ottoman, crowned by a palm. Apart from that, there were a great many chairs and large candelabra. Everything was well maintained and pompously banal, unhomely and without a single intimate corner, as if always expecting the next reception. In the semi-darkness of the paraffin lamps — just a single lamp was lit in each candelabra — the long, wide gallery stretched out in vacant tedium.
The second gong sounded. On the back veranda the table, overlong and as if forever awaiting guests, had been laid for three. The butler and six or so servants stood waiting at the serving tables and the two buffets. The butler had already started filling plates with soup, and a few of the servants put the three bowls of soup on the table, on top of the folded napkins lying on the plates. Then, once more, they continued to wait, while the soup steamed faintly. Another boy filled the water glasses with large cubes of ice.