CHAPTER X
THERE was a ring; and Ottilie whispered:
“Do you think that’s Mr. Lot and Miss
Elly?…”
“No,” said Anna, looking out of the window,
“it’s Mr. Harold.”
And she went to the front-door. Ottilie came out
to her brother in the passage.
“How are you, Ottilie?” said Harold Dercksz.
“Is there no one with Mamma?”
“No. I met Mr. Takma just outside the door.
Look, he’s fallen asleep. I’m waiting here till he
wakes.”
“Then I’ll go up to Mamma meanwhile.”
“You’re looking poorly, Harold.”
“Yes. I do not feel well. I’m in pain …”
“Where?”
“Everywhere. Heart, liver: everything’s wrong.
…So to-morrow is the great day, Ottilie?”
“Yes,” said Ottilie, mournfully, “to-morrow.
… They’re so unenterprising. No reception
and no religious marriage.”
“Lot asked me to lie one of his witnesses.”
“Yes, you and Steyn, with Dr. Roelofsz and
D’Herbourg for Elly…. Anton declined….”
“Yes, Anton doesn’t care for that sort of thing.”
He went upstairs slowly, knocked, opened the
door. The companion was sitting with the old
woman and reading something out of the paper in
a monotonous voice. She rose from her chair:
“Here’s Mr. Harold, mevrouw.”
She left the room; and the son bent over his
mother and gave her a very gentle kiss on the forehead.
As it was dark, the lined porcelain of the
old woman’s face was hardly indicated in the crimson
twilight of the curtains and the tall valance.
She sat on the chair, in the cashmere folds of her
wide dress, straight upright, as on a throne; and
in her lap the frail fingers trembled like slender
wands in the black mittens. A few words were exchanged
between mother and son, he sitting on a
chair beside her, for no one ever took the chair
by the window, which was kept exclusively for Mr.
Takma: words about health and weather and the
wedding of Elly and Lot next day. Sometimes a
look of pain came over Harold’s parchment-coloured
face; and his mouth was drawn as though with
cramp. And, while he talked about Lot and about
health and weather, he saw—as he always saw, when
sitting here beside or opposite Mamma—the things
that passed and dragged their ghostly veils over the
path rustling with dead leaves: the things that passed
so slowly, years and years to every yard, until it
seemed as though they never would be past and as
though he would always continue to see them, ever
drawing out their pageant along the age-long path.
While he talked about health and weather and Lot,
he saw—as he always saw, when sitting beside or
opposite Mamma—the one thing, the one terrible
Thing, the Thing begotten in that night of clattering
rain in the lonely pasangrahan at Tegal; and
he heard the hushed voices: Baboe’s whispering
voice; Takma’s nervous-angry voice of terror; his
mother’s voice of sobbing despair; himself a mere
child of thirteen. He knew; he had seen, he had
heard. He was the only one who had heard, who
had seen. All his life long—and he was an old,
sick man now—he had seen the Thing slowly passing
like that; and the others had heard nothing, seen
nothing, known nothing…. Had they really
not known, not seen, not heard? He often asked
himself the question. Roelofsz must surely have
seen the wound. And Roelofsz had never mentioned
a wound; on the contrary, he had denied it…
Rumours had gone about, vague rumours, of a
woman in the kampong, of a stab with a kris, of
a trail of blood: how many rumours were there not
going about! His father was drowned in the river,
one sultry night, when he had gone into the garden
for air and been caught in the pelting rain….
The Thing, the terrible Thing was passing, was a
step farther, looked round at him with staring eyes.
Why did they all live to be so old and why did the
Thing pass so slowly? … He knew: he had
known more … because of rumours which he
had heard; because of what he had guessed instinctively
in later years, when he was no longer a child:
his father hearing a sound … a sound of voices
in his wife’s room…. Takma’s voice, the intimate
friend of the house…. His suspicions:
was he right? Was it Takma? Yes, it was Takma.
… Takma in his wife’s room…. His rage,
his jealousy; his eyes that saw red; his hand seeking
for a weapon…. No weapon but the kris, the
handsome ornamental kris, a present which Papa
received only yesterday from the Regent….
He steals to his wife’s room…. There …
there … he hears their voices…. They
are laughing, they are laughing under their breath.
… He flings himself against the door; the bamboo
bolt gives way; he rushes in…. Two men
face to face because of a woman…. Their contest,
their passion, as in primeval days….
Takma has snatched the kris from Harold’s father.
… No longer human beings, no longer men, but
male animals fighting over a female…. No
other thoughts in their red brains and before their
red gaze but their passion and their jealousy and
their wrath…. His father mortally wounded!
… But Harold Dercksz does not see his mother
in all this: he does not see her, he does not know
how she behaves, how she behaved during the struggle
between these two animal men…. He does
not see how the female behaved: that never rose up
before his intuition, however often he may have
stared after the Thing that passed, however often,
for years and years, again and again he may have
sat beside his mother, talking about health and
weather. And to-day it is much stronger than his
whole being; and he asks the very old woman:
“Was your companion reading the paper to
you?”
“Yes.”
“Does she read nicely?”
“Yes. She sometimes finds it difficult to know
what to choose.”
“Politics don’t interest you?”
“The war does: it’s terrible, all that loss of human
life.”
“It’s murder … on a large scale….”
“Yes, it’s murder….”
“Does she read you the serial story?”
“No, no; I don’t care for serials.”
“No more do I.”
“We are too old for that.”
“Yes, we old people have our own serial
stories….”
“Yes…. A quiet life’s the best….”
“Then you have nothing to reproach yourself
with….”
He sees the slender, wand-like fingers tremble.
Has she anything to reproach herself with, more
than her infidelity to the man who was her husband?
He has never seen it for himself; and yet the Thing
has always and always dragged its ghostly veils
rustling over dead leaves……
“Hasn’t she been reading about that murder?”
“What murder?”
“In England, the woman who …”
“No, no, she never reads me that sort of
thing….”
Her words are almost an entreaty…. How
old she is, how old she is! … The toothless
mouth trembles and mumbles, the fingers shake violently.
He is full of pity, he, the son, who knows
and who suspects what he does not know, because
he knows the soul of that mother, her soul now
dulled and blunted in waiting for the body’s death,
but her soul also once a soul of passion, of temper,
an amorous Creole soul, capable at one moment of
forgetting all the world and life itself for a single
instant of rapture … or perhaps of hate! He
knows that she hated his father, after first adoring
him; that she hated him because her own passion
expired before him in a heap of ashes…. This
had all been made clear to him, gradually, year after
year, when he was no longer a child but grew into
a man and was a man and understood and looked
back and reflected and pieced together what he had
understood and looked back upon…. He suspects,
because he knows her soul. But how blunted
that soul is now; and how old she is, how old she is!
A pity softens his own soul, old, old, too, and full
of melancholy for all the things of life gone by
… for his mother … and for himself, an
old man now…. How old she is, how old
she is! … Hush, oh, hush: let her grow just
a little older; and then it will be over and the Thing
will have passed! The last fold of its spectral veil
will have vanished; the last leaf on that endless,
endless path will have rustled; and, though once a
rumour, vaguely, with a dismal moaning, hovered
through those trees, it never grew into a voice and
an accusation and, from among those trees, no one
ever stepped forward with threatening hand that
stayed the Thing, the sombre, ghostly Thing, dragging
itself along its long road, for years and
years and years….
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