Yes, Theo knew. He had spoken to Oorip after lunch; and although the maid had at first tried to deny everything, afraid of losing the sarongs, she had been unable to continue lying and had contented herself with feeble little protests of “no ... no.”... And, still early that same afternoon, raging with jealousy, he sought out Addie. But Theo was calmed by the indifferent composure of the good-looking youth, with his Moorish face, already so fully sated with his conquests that he himself never felt any jealousy. Theo was calmed by the complete absence of thought in this tempter, who at once forgot everything after an hour of love; forgot so gracefully that he looked up with eyes of ingenuous surprise when Theo, red and boiling with fury, burst into his room and, standing before his bed—where he was lying quite naked, as was his habit during his siesta, with the magnificence of a bronze statue, sublime as an ancient sculpture—declared that he would strike him across the face. And Addie’s surprise was so artless, his indifference so harmonious, he seemed to have so utterly forgotten his hour of love of the night before, he laughed so serenely at the idea of fighting about a woman that Theo quieted down and came and sat on the edge of his bed. And then Addie, who was a couple of years younger but possessed incomparable experience, told him that he really mustn’t do it again—get so angry about a woman, a mistress who gave herself to another. And Addie patted him on the shoulder with almost fatherly compassion; and now, since they understood each other, they went on confidentially pumping one another as they chatted.

They exchanged further confidences, about women, about girls. Theo asked if Addie was going to marry Doddie. But Addie said that he wasn’t thinking of marrying and that the resident wouldn’t be willing either, because he didn’t care for Addie’s family and thought them too Indian. Then, in a single word, he let slip his pride in his Solo descent and his pride in the halo which shone dimly behind the heads of all the De Luces. And Addie asked if Theo knew that he had a young brother running wild in the compound. Theo knew nothing about it. But Addie assured him that it was so: a young son of papa’s, mark you, from the time when the governor was still controller at Ngadjiwa; a fellow of their own age, a regular Eurasian: the mother was dead. Perhaps the old man himself didn’t know that he still had a son in the compound, but it was true; everybody knew it: the regent knew, the native councillor knew, the head of the district knew, and the meanest coolie knew. There was no actual proof; but a thing like that, which was known the whole world over, was as true as that the world itself existed.... What did the fellow do? Nothing, except curse and swear, declaring that he was a son of the kandjeng tuan residÈn, who allowed him to rot in the compound.... What did he live on? On nothing, on what he got by shameless begging, on what people gave him and then ... by all sorts of practices: by going round the districts, through all the villages, and asking if there were any complaints and then drawing up little petitions; by encouraging people to go to Mecca and let him book their passages with very cheap little steamship-companies of which he was the unofficial agent: he would go to the remotest village and display coloured posters representing a steamer full of Mecca pilgrims and the Kaaba and the Sacred Tomb of Mohammed. He would mess around like this, sometimes mixed up in rows, once in a robbery, sometimes dressed in a sarong, sometimes in an old striped calico suit; and he slept anywhere. And, when Theo showed surprise and said that he had never heard of this half-brother of his and expressed curiosity, Addie suggested that they should go and look him up, if he was to be found in the compound. And Addie gaily and quickly took his bath and put on a clean white suit; and they went across the road and along the rice-fields into the compound.

It was already dusk under the heavy trees: the bananas lifted the cool green paddles of their leaves; and under the stately canopy of the coco-palms the little bamboo houses hid, romantically Oriental, idyllic, with their palm-leaf roofs, their doors often already closed, or, if open, framing a little black inward vista, with the vague outline of a bench on which squatted a dark figure. The scabby, hairless dogs barked; the children, naked, with bells dangling from their stomachs, ran indoors and stared out of the houses; the women kept quiet, recognizing the tempter and vaguely laughing, blinking their eyes as he passed in his glory. And Addie pointed to the little house where his old babu lived, Tidjem, the woman who helped him, who always opened her door to him when he wanted the use of her hut, who worshipped him as his mother and his sisters and his little nieces worshipped him. He showed Theo the house and thought of his walk last night with Doddie under the tjemaras. Tidjem the babu saw him and ran up to him delightedly. She squatted down beside him, she pressed his leg against her withered breast, she rubbed her forehead against his knee, she kissed his white shoe, she gazed at him in rapture, her beautiful prince, her raden, whom she had rocked as a little chubby boy in her already infatuated arms. He tapped her on the shoulder and gave her a rix-dollar and asked her if she knew where Si-Oudijck was, because his brother wished to see him.

Tidjem stood up and beckoned to him to follow: it was some way to walk. And they stepped out of the compound into an open road with rails along it, by which the bamboo baskets filled with sugar were removed to the proas that lay moored at a landing-stage yonder, in the Brantas. The sun was going down in a fan-shaped glory of orange sheaves; and the distant rows of trees that outlined the paddy-fields were washed in with dark, soft, velvety touches against their arrogant glow. These fields were not yet planted, but their dark, earth-coloured expanse lay as broken by the plough. From the factory came a few men and women, making their way home. Beside the river, by the landing-stage, a small market of portable kitchens had been set up under a sacred, five-fold banyan-tree, with its five trunks merging into one another and its wide-spreading roots. Tidjem called the ferry-man and he put them across, across the orange Brantas, amidst the last yellow rays of the sun, outspread fanwise like a peacock’s tail. When they were on the other bank, the night fell over everything, like the hasty fall of a gauze curtain; and the clouds, which all through November had threatened the low horizons, hung oppressively on the sultry air. And they entered another compound, lit here and there by a paraffin-lamp, set down on the ground, with a long lamp-glass but no globe. At last they came to a little house, built partly of bamboo, partly of old packing-cases, and roofed partly with tiles, partly with palm-leaves. Tidjem pointed to it and, once more squatting on the ground and embracing and kissing Addie’s knee, asked permission to depart. Addie knocked at the door; a grumbling and rumbling within was the only answer; but, when Addie called out, the door was kicked open and the two young men stepped into the one room of which the hut consisted: half bamboo, half deal boards from packing-cases; a couch with a couple of dirty pillows in a corner, and a limp chintz curtain dangling in front of it; a crazy table with a chair or two; on the table, a paraffin-lamp without a globe; and a litter of oddments stacked on a packing-case in a corner. Everything was permeated with an acrid odour of opium.

And Si-Oudijck was sitting at the table with an Arab, while a Javanese woman squatted on the couch, preparing a leaf of betel for herself. A few sheets of paper lay on the table between the Arab and the young half-caste. The last-named, evidently annoyed by the unexpected visit, hurriedly crumpled the papers together. But he recovered his composure and, assuming a jovial air, cried:

“Hullo, Adipati! Susuhunan! Sultan of Patjaram! Sugar-lord! How are you, my god of beauty, the ruin of all good women?”

His jovial torrent of greetings continued without ceasing, while he scrambled the papers together and made a sign to the Arab, who disappeared through the other door, at the back.

“And who’s that with you, Raden Mas Adrianus, my bonnie Lucius?”

“It’s your little brother,” said Addie.

Si-Oudijck looked up suddenly:

“Oh, is it really?” said he, speaking broken Dutch, Javanese and Malay in the same breath. “I can see it is: my legitimate one. And what does the fellow want?”

“He’s come to see what you’re like.”

The two brothers looked at each other: Theo inquisitively, rejoicing at having made this discovery, as a weapon against the old man, if the weapon ever became necessary; the other, Si-Oudijck, secretly restraining, behind his brown, crafty, leering face, all his jealousy, all his bitterness and hatred.

“Is this where you live?” asked Theo, for the sake of saying something.

“No, I’m just staying with her for the time being,” replied Si-Oudijck, with a jerk of his head towards the woman.

“Has your mother been dead long?”

“Yes. Yours is still alive, isn’t she? She lives in Batavia. I know her. Do you ever see her?”

“No.”

“H’m.... Prefer your step-mother?”

“Pretty well,” said Theo, drily. And, changing the subject, “I don’t believe the old man knows that you exist.”

“Yes, he does.”

“I doubt it. Have you ever spoken to him?”

“Yes, formerly. Years ago.”

“Well?”

“No use. He says I’m not his son.”

“It must be difficult to prove.”

“Legally, yes. But it’s a fact and everybody knows it. It’s known all over Ngadjiwa.”

“Have you no sort of evidence?”

“Only the oath which my mother took when she was dying, before witnesses.”

“Come, tell me things,” said Theo. “Walk a bit of the way with us: it’s stuffy in here.”

They left the hut and sauntered back through the compounds, while Si-Oudijck told his story. They strolled beside the Brantas, which wound vaguely in the evening dusk under a sky powdered with stars.

It did Theo good to hear about all this, about that housekeeper of his father’s, in the days of his controllership, dismissed for an infidelity of which she was guiltless; the child born later and never recognized, never maintained; the boy wandering from compound to compound, romantically proud of his inhuman father, whom he watched from a distance, following him with his furtive glance when the father became assistant-resident and resident, married, divorced his wife and married again; by slow degrees learning to read and write from a native scrivener of his acquaintance. It did the legitimate son good to hear about all this, because in his innermost self, fair-haired and fair-skinned though he might be, he was more the son of his mother, the half-caste, than of his father; because in his innermost self he hated his father, not for this or that reason, but from a secret antipathy in his blood, because, despite the appearance and behaviour of a fair-haired and fair-skinned European, he felt a secret kinship for this illegitimate brother, felt a vague sympathy for him. Were they not both sons of the self-same motherland, for which their father felt nothing except as a result of his acquired development, the artificially cultivated, humane love of the ruler for the territory which he governs. From his childhood Theo had felt like that, far removed from his father; and later that antipathy had grown into a slumbering hatred. It gave him pleasure to hear the legend of his faultless parent demolished; the impeccable, magnanimous man, a functionary of the highest integrity, who loved his domestic circle, loved his residency, loved the Javanese, and was anxious to uphold the regent’s family, not only because his official instructions prescribed that the Javanese nobility should be respected, but because his own heart told him as much, when he thought of the noble old pangÉran.... Theo knew that his father was all this: blameless, high-minded, upright, magnanimous; and it did him good, here, in the mysterious evening beside the Brantas, to hear that blamelessness, that high-minded, upright magnanimity torn to ribbons; it did him good to meet an outcast who in one moment spattered that high-throned paternal figure with mud and filth, dragging him from his pedestal, making him appear no higher than another, sinful, wicked, heartless, mean. It filled him with a wicked joy, even as he was filled with a wicked joy at possessing his father’s wife, whom his father adored. What to do with this dark secret he did not yet know, but he clutched at it as a weapon; he was whetting it there, that very evening, while he listened to the end to what this furtive-eyed half-caste, ranting and working himself up, had to say. And Theo hid his secret, hid his weapon deep in his heart.

Grievances rose in his mind; and he too now, the legitimate son, abused his father; declared that the resident did no more to help him, his own lawful son, to get on than he would do for any of his clerks; told him how his father had once recommended him to the manager of an impossible undertaking, a rice-plantation, where he had been unable to stay longer than a single month; how afterwards he had left him to his fate, thwarting him when he went hunting after concessions, even in other residencies, even in Borneo, until he was now obliged to remain hanging about and sponging at home, unable to find a job, thanks to his father, and merely tolerated in that house where he disliked everything.

“Except your step-mother!” Si-Oudijck interpolated, drily.

But Theo went on, growing confidential in his turn and telling his brother that it would be no great advantage for him even if he were acknowledged and legitimatized. And in this way they both became excited, glad to have met each other, to have grown intimate in this brief hour. And beside them walked Addie, surprised by this quick mutual attraction, but otherwise empty of thought. They had crossed a bridge and by a circuitous route had come out behind the Patjaram factory-buildings. Here Si-Oudijck said good-night, shaking hands with Theo, who slipped a couple of rix-dollars into his palm. They were accepted greedily, with a flicker of the furtive glance, but not a word of thanks. And Addie and Theo went past the factory, now silent, to the house. The family were strolling, outside, in the garden and in the tjemara-avenue. And, as the two young men approached, the golden, eight-year-old child came running towards them, the old grandmother’s little foster-princess, with her fringe of hair and her whitened forehead, in her rich little, doll-like dress. She came running up to them and suddenly stopped in front of Addie and looked up at him. Addie asked her what she wanted, but the child did not answer and only looked up at him and then, putting out her little hand, stroked his hand with it. It was all so clearly the result of an irresistible magnetism in the shy child, this running up, stopping, looking up and stroking, that Addie laughed aloud and stooped and kissed her lightly. The child skipped back contentedly. And Theo, still excited by his evening, first by his conversation with Oorip and then by his explanation with Addie, his meeting with his half-brother, his own confidences about his father—Theo, feeling bitter and interesting, was so greatly irritated by this trivial behaviour of Addie and the child, that he exclaimed, almost angrily:

“Oh, you ... you’ll never be anything but a woman’s man!...”