"But that, you see, the thing that happened.... I never understood; and it's that which brought me to where I am. That ... all that ... which clashed and interfered with my practical, logical ideas of life ... all that"--he struck the table with his fist--"all that damned nonsense, which ... which happened all the same: that did the trick. I did not shirk the fight, but my strength was no use to me. It was something against which nothing availed.... I know: it was the regent. When I threatened him it stopped.... But, my God, mevrouwtje, tell me, what was it? Do you know? You don't, do you? Nobody knew and nobody knows. Those terrible nights, those inexplicable noises over head, that night in the bathroom with the major and the other officers! It wasn't any hallucination: we saw it, we heard it, we felt it, it spat at us, it covered us from head to foot; the whole bathroom was full of it! It is easy for other people, who didn't experience it, to deny it. But I ... and all of us ... we saw it, heard it and felt it! And we none of us knew who it was.... And since then I have never ceased to feel it. It was all around me, in the air, under my feet.... You see," he whispered very softly, "that--and that alone--did it. That made it impossible for me to stay there. That caused me to be struck stupid, to become a sort of idiot in the midst of my normal life, in the midst of my practical good sense and logic, which suddenly appeared to me in the light of an ill-constructed theory of life, of the most abstract speculation, because, right through it, things were happening that belonged to another world, things that escaped me and everybody else. That, that alone, did it! I was no longer myself. I no longer knew what I was thinking, what I was doing, what I had done. Everything in me was tottering. That ruffian in the compound is no child of mine: I'll stake my life on it. And I ... I believed it. I sent him money. Tell me, do you understand me? I don't suppose you do. It's not to be understood, that strange, unnatural business, if you haven't experienced it, in your flesh and in your blood, till it finds its way into your marrow...." "I do believe that I also experienced it, once in a way," she whispered. "When I was walking with Van Helderen by the sea ... and the sky was so far and the night so deep ... or the rains came rustling towards us from so very far away and then fell ... or when the nights, silent as death and yet brimful of sounds, quivered about one, always with a music which one could not catch and could scarcely hear.... Or simply when I looked into the eyes of a Javanese, when I spoke to my babu and it seemed as though nothing of what I said reached her mind and as though what she replied concealed her real, secret answer...."