Hoofdstuk 6

The controller Verbrugge was a good man.

Seeing him sit there in his blue broadcloth dress-coat, with embroidered oak and orange sprigs on collar and cuffs, it was hard not to recognize in him the type that prevails among the Dutchmen in the Indies — a breed of men, be it said in passing, very different from the Dutchmen in Holland.

Sluggish so long as there was nothing to do, and far from the meddlesome fussiness that passes for zeal in Europe, yet diligent wherever work was needed; plain but warm-hearted toward those of his own circle; open-handed, obliging, and hospitable; well-mannered without stiffness; receptive to good impressions; honest and sincere, though without feeling any urge to become a martyr to these qualities — in short, he was a man who, as the saying goes, would be in his right place anywhere, without anyone's ever taking it into his head to name the age after him, which he himself did not in fact desire.

He sat in the middle of the pendoppo, at the table that was covered with a white cloth and laden with food.

From time to time, somewhat impatiently, he asked — in the words of Bluebeard's wife's sister — of the mandoor-oppasser, that is, the head of the police and the office-servants of the assistant-residency, whether nothing was on its way yet.

Now and then he stood up, tried in vain to make his spurs clatter on the stamped clay floor of the pendoppo, lit his cigar for the twentieth time, and, as if disappointed, sat back down again.

He said little. And yet he could have spoken, for he was not alone.

By this I do not mean precisely that he was accompanied by the twenty or thirty Javanese — servants, mantries, and oppassers — who sat crouched on the ground inside and outside the pendoppo, nor by the many who kept running in and out, nor by the great number of natives of various rank who held the horses out there or rode about on horseback — no, the Regent of Lebak himself, Radhen Adhipatti Karta Natta Nagara, sat facing him.

Waiting is always tedious. A quarter of an hour drags on like an hour, an hour like half a day, and so on.

Verbrugge might well have been a little more talkative.

The Regent of Lebak was a cultivated old man who could speak about a great many things with sense and judgment. One had only to look at him to be convinced that the majority of the Europeans who came into contact with him had more to learn from him than he from them.

His lively dark eyes belied, by their fire, the weariness of the features of his face and the grayness of his hair.

What he said had usually been long considered — a peculiarity, by the way, that is general among cultivated Orientals — and when one was in conversation with him, one felt that one had to regard his words as letters of which he kept the draft in his files, so as to refer back to them if need be.

Now this may seem disagreeable to anyone unaccustomed to dealing with Javanese grandees; yet it is not hard to avoid all subjects of conversation that might give offense, all the more so because they, for their part, will never abruptly steer the course of the exchange in another direction, since by Eastern notions this would be at odds with good manners.

Whoever, then, has reason to avoid broaching a particular point need only speak of trivial matters, and he can be assured that a Javanese chief will not, by some unwished-for turn in the conversation, lead him onto ground he would rather not tread.

On the best manner of dealing with these chiefs, opinions, moreover, differ.

It seems to me that plain sincerity, without any striving after diplomatic caution, deserves the preference.

However that may be, Verbrugge began with a banal remark about the weather and the rain.

"Yes, mijnheer the controller, it is the west monsoon."

Now this Verbrugge knew well enough: it was January.

But what he had said about the rain, the Regent knew too.

To this there followed once again a certain silence.

With a barely perceptible movement of his head, the Regent beckoned one of the servants who sat crouched at the entrance of the pendoppo. A small boy, charmingly attired in a blue velvet jacket, white trousers, with a golden waistband that held his costly sarong fast about his loins, and on his head the becoming kain kapala, from beneath which his black eyes peeped out so mischievously, crept crouching up to the Regent's feet, set down the golden box that held the tobacco, the lime, the sirie, the pinang, and the gambier, made the slamat by raising both joined hands to his deeply bowed forehead, and thereupon offered his master the precious box.

"The road will be difficult after so much rain," said the Regent, as if to account for the long wait, while he spread lime on a betel leaf.

"In the Pandeglang district the road is not so bad," answered Verbrugge, who — if at least he meant to broach nothing jarring — gave this reply rather thoughtlessly. For he ought to have considered that a Regent of Lebak does not gladly hear the roads of Pandeglang praised, even if they really are better than those in the Lebak district.

The Adhipatti did not commit the fault of too quick a reply.

The little fellow had already crept backwards, still crouching, to the entrance of the pendoppo, where he took his place among his comrades — the Regent had already stained his lips and few teeth brownish-red with the juice of his sirie, before he said:

"Yes, there are many people in Pandeglang."

To anyone who knew the Regent and the controller, to anyone for whom the state of Lebak was no secret, it might plainly have appeared that the conversation had already become a contest.

An allusion, namely, to the better condition of the roads in a neighboring division seemed to be the sequel to fruitless efforts to have such better roads laid out in Lebak too, or to have the existing ones better maintained.

Yet in this the Regent was right: that Pandeglang was more densely populated, especially in proportion to its far smaller area, and that there, accordingly, the labor on the high roads, done by combined forces, came easier than in the Lebak district — a division that, over hundreds of square miles of territory, counted only seventy thousand inhabitants.

"That is true," said Verbrugge, "we have few people here, but ..."

The Adhipatti looked at him, as though awaiting an attack.

He knew that after that "but" something might follow that would be unpleasant to hear for him, who had been Regent of Lebak for thirty years.

It seemed that at this moment Verbrugge had no wish to carry on the contest.

At any rate he broke off the conversation, and asked the mandoor-oppasser again whether he saw nothing coming.

"I still see nothing from the direction of Pandeglang, mijnheer the controller, but over yonder, on the other side, someone is riding on horseback ... it is the toewan commandant."

"Why, of course, Dongso," said Verbrugge, staring outside, "that is the commandant! He is hunting in these parts, and went out early this morning."

Hey, Duclari ... Duclari!

"He hears you already, mijnheer, he is coming this way."

His boy is riding behind him, with a kidang slung behind him across the horse.

"Pegang koedahnja toewan kommendaan," Verbrugge ordered one of the servants sitting outside. "Bonjour, Duclari!

Are you wet? What did you shoot?

Come in!"

A vigorous man of some thirty years, of soldierly bearing, though there was not a trace of uniform about him, stepped into the pendoppo. It was First Lieutenant Duclari, commandant of the small garrison at Rangkas-Betoeng.

He and Verbrugge were friends, and their intimacy was the greater since Duclari had for some time been living in Verbrugge's house while awaiting the completion of a new fort.