“That’s a train bringing hajis,” said Van Oudijck. “All newly returned from Mecca.”
The train stopped, and from the long third-class carriages, solemnly, slowly, full of piety and aware of their worth, the pilgrims alighted, heads in rich yellow and white turbans, eyes gleaming proudly, lips pressed together superciliously, in shiny new jackets, golden-yellow and purple cloaks, which fell in stately folds almost to their feet. Buzzing with rapture, sometimes with a mounting cry of suppressed ecstasy, the throng pressed closer and stormed the exits of the long carriages… The pilgrims alighted solemnly. Their brothers and friends vied with each other in grabbing their hands, the hems of their golden-yellow and purple cloaks, and kissed their sacred hands, their holy garment, because it brought them something from holy Mecca. They fought and jostled around the pilgrims to be the first one to kiss them. And the pilgrims, contemptuous and self-confident, seemed not to see the struggle, and were superior, calm, solemn and dignified amid the fighting, amid the surging and buzzing throng, and surrendered their hands to them, surrendered the hems of their tunics to the fanatical kiss of anyone who came near.
It was strange in this country of deeply secret slumbering mystery, to see arising in this Javanese people — who as always cloaked themselves in the mystery of their impenetrable soul — an ecstatic passion, repressed and yet visible, to see the fixed stares of drunken fanaticism, to see part of their impenetrable soul revealing itself in their adulation of those who had seen the tomb of the Prophet, to hear the soft throb of religious rapture, to hear a shrill, sudden, unexpected, irrepressible cry of glory, which immediately died away, melted into the buzz, as if frightened of itself, since the sacred moment had not yet arrived…
On the road behind the station Van Oudijck and Eva, making slow progress because of the bustling crowd — which was still surrounding the pilgrims with its buzz, respectfully carrying their luggage, obsequiously offering their carts — suddenly looked at each other, and though neither of them wanted to put it into words, they said it to each other with a look of understanding, that they both felt it — both of them, simul taneously, there amid that fanatical throng — felt It, That.
They both felt it, the ineffable: what is hidden in the ground, what hisses beneath the volcanoes, what wafts in on the distant winds, what rushes in with the rain, what rumbles in with the deeply rolling thunder, what floats in from the wide horizon over the endless sea, what looks out from the black secret eye of the inscrutable native, what creeps into his heart and squats in his humble respect, what gnaws like a poison and an enmity at the body, soul and life of the European, what silently resists the conqueror and wears him down and makes him languish and die, if not immediately die a tragic death: they both felt it, the Ineffable…
In feeling it, together with the melancholy of their impending farewell, they did not see among the swaying, surging, buzzing throng that pushed along, apparently respectfully, the yellow and purple dignitaries — the pilgrims returning from Mecca — they did not see one large white figure rise above the throng and leer at the man who, however he had lived his life in Java, had been weaker than That…
Pasuruan — Batavia
October 1899—February 1900
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
The first English translation of Couperus’s novel appeared in London in 1922 and was followed by an American edition in 1924. The translator was Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (1865–1921), a naturalized Englishman of Dutch extraction, who knew the author and translated several of his best-known works.
In 1985, for the scholarly Library of the Indies series published by the University of Massachusetts Press, the editor, E.M. Beekman, produced a revised, extensively annotated version. Most of Teixeira’s text is retained on the grounds of its “congruence of tone with the original” (p. 40), but a number of slips are corrected, the confusing British Raj-linked terms of address “sahib” and “memsahib” are abandoned and a number of suppressed, sexually explicit passages restored. A full glossary of Malay terms is provided. Readers requiring a fuller historical, political and ethnic background to the story are referred to Beekman’s very useful edition. However, for all its many virtues this is a compromise translation, in which the language of 1900 occasionally jars with contemporary (American) idiom, while the plethora of Malay terms slows today’s reader down, without, in my view adding greatly to the immediacy or impact of the narrative.
In this translation I have chosen not to annotate, but to explain terms in the body of the text on first occurrence. Two important Dutch official titles have been paraphrased: “resident” (potentially misleading in English) as “(district) commissioner”, and “regent”, denoting a hereditary Javanese noble employed by the colonial authorities to assist the commissioner, as “prince”. For the sake of consistency, “Eurasian” is used throughout to refer to mixed-race individuals, and “Creole” to designate those of European ancestry brought up and resident in the Indies. Current Indonesian spelling has been used throughout for Malay words, titles and place names. Historical geographical names associated with Dutch colonial rule, like Batavia and Buitenzorg, have been retained in preference to their modern equivalents, Jakarta and Kota Bogor, respectively.
The Dutch text used is that of the critical reading edition in volume 17 of K. Reijnders et al., eds, Louis Couperus. Volledige Werken, 50 vols (Utrecht/Antwerp: Veen, 1987–96).
P.V.
AFTERWORD
In 1900, when The Hidden Force was first published, Holland ruled the Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. In 1899, the sultans of Aceh had been defeated and the whole island of Sumatra brought under Dutch rule. The smaller islands, such as Lombok, the Moluccas and the Lesser Sunda Islands, were subjugated in the 1880s and 1890s. And Java already had been colonized for some time before that.
As it turned out, complete Dutch control over its Asian colony was only to last for about fifty years. But of course nobody could have known that in 1900. To the Dutch governors, planters, businessmen, administrators, police officers, scholars, geographers, soldiers, bankers, travellers, railway engineers, schoolteachers, and their wives, 1900 must have felt like the best of times.
It was also just then, at the very peak of Dutch colonial power, that an idea of nationhood began to emerge among native intellectuals. A Javanese feminist, Radèn-ayeng Kartini, advocated education for women. And, in 1908, her friend Dr Sudara founded the Budi Utomo, the first nationalist association, inspired by the example of Mahatma Gandhi. National independence was not their immediate aim. They wanted a bigger say in the way they were governed. And there was growing sympathy for this view in the Netherlands. The “liberal” policy, which meant the liberty of Dutch planters to exploit the colonies as they saw fit, was replaced by the “ethical” policy, which took a fuller account of native interests. But full independence would only come after the Second World War, during which the Japanese shook the foundations of European rule by showing the white imperialist, so to speak, without clothes.
In fact, the Europeans always were vulnerable. Colonial rule, in Indonesia as well as, say, India, had to be based to some extent on bluff; the idea of European supremacy had to seem natural, and for it to appear that way the Europeans themselves, as much as the native populations under their control, had to believe it to be so. As soon as the colonialists lost faith in their natural right to rule — a loss which Nirad C. Chaudhuri, speaking of the British in India, once memorably characterized as “funk”—the colonial edifice, built over time, often haphazardly, would begin to rot, slowly, at first imperceptibly, but relentlessly, until the whole thing came toppling down. Perhaps it is so with all authoritarian systems. Loss of nerve was certainly a factor in the collapse of the Soviet empire. So perhaps Mountbatten and Gorbachev had something in common.