The Hidden Force Read Online Free PDF Page A

price. And so she put it down gently and said:
    “No, madam, really… the stone is too expensive, and my husband has no money.”
    She said it so sweetly that her intention was impossible to guess. She was adorable in her self-denial. As she spoke the words, Van Oudijck felt a second jolt. He couldn’t refuse his wife anything.
    “Madam,” he said. “You can leave the stone here… for three hundred guilders. But for goodness’ sake, take your jars away with you.”
    Mrs Van Does looked up triumphantly.
    “Well… what did I tell you? I knew the Commissioner would buy for you…”
    Mrs Van Oudijck looked up with a gently reproachful look.
    “But Otto!” she said. “How could you?”
    “Do you like the stone?”
    “Yes, it’s wonderful… but so much money! For one stone!”
    And she pulled her husband’s hand towards her and allowed him to kiss her on the forehead, since he had been allowed to buy her a three-hundred-guilder jewel. Doddy and Theo winked at each other.

4
    L ÉONIE VAN OUDIJCK always enjoyed her siesta. She slept only briefly, but loved being alone in her cool room after the
rijsttafel
until five o’clock or five-thirty in the afternoon. She read a little, usually the magazines from the circulating library, but mainly she did nothing and daydreamed. Vague blue-tinted fantasies filled her periods of afternoon solitude. No one knew about them and she kept them strictly secret, like a hidden sin, a vice. She was much more inclined to reveal herself to the world when it came to an affair. They never lasted long and didn’t count for much in her life; she never wrote letters, and the favours she granted never gave the privileged one any rights in daily discourse. This made her silently and decorously perverse, both physically and morally. Her fantasies too, however limply poetic, were perverse. Her favourite author was Catulle Mendès: she liked all those flowerlets of sky-blue sentimentality, those pink affected Cupids, little fingers in the air, little legs charmingly fluttering—framing the most degenerate motifs and themes of perverted passion. In her bedroom there were a few pictures: a young woman lying back on a lace-covered bed, and kissed by two rompingangels; another, a lion with its breast pierced by an arrow, at the feet of a smiling maiden; a large advertising poster for perfume—a kind of flower nymph, whose veil was being torn off on all sides by playful cherubs. She was particularly fond of that picture, and couldn’t imagine anything more aesthetic. She knew it was monstrous, but she had never been able to bring herself to take down the frightful thing, even though people looked disapprovingly at it—her friends and her children, who walked in and out of her room with that casualness typical of the Indies, which makes no secret of the act of dressing. She could gaze at it for minutes on end as if enchanted; she thought it utterly charming, and her own dreams were like that in the poster. She also kept a chocolate box with a keepsake picture on it, as a kind of beauty she found even more beautiful than her own: cheeks flushed, coquettish brown eyes beneath improbably golden hair, the bosom visible beneath lace. But she never gave away what she vaguely sensed was ridiculous; she never talked about those pictures and boxes, precisely because she knew they were ugly. But she thought they were beautiful, she loved them and considered them artistic and poetic.
    These were her favourite hours.
    Here in Labuwangi she didn’t dare do what she did in Batavia, and here people could scarcely believe what was said in Batavia. Yet Mrs Van Does was adamant that “that commissioner and that inspector”—one travelling, the other on an official tour and staying at the Commissioner’s residencefor a few days—had found their way to Léonie’s bedroom in the afternoon, during the siesta. But at Labuwangi such realities were rare intermezzos among Mrs Van Oudijck’s pink afternoon