Argosy (UK), January 1955 — page 19: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

BLACK MAGIC. 17 Ketip, the coachman. As far as these last were concerned, the order might be the other way about—Mr. Van Houten really didn’t exactly know, for he seldom went farther than the bathroom, except, for instance, when young Ketip came to ask him to have a look at Piet (the little black stallion that took him to the office every morning), or at the roof of the coach-house, which had a tendency to start leaking towards the end of every wet monsoon. And on such rare occasions he took good care not to glance into any of those dark, windowless dens, from which the sounds ~ of children crying sometimes penetrated to the outer world, together with a rather unpleasant odour of coconut oil and all kinds of native herbs and simples. There, in the back compound, was a little, self-contained world, from the frontiers of which Thérése, at his express wish, had kept the children as far away as possible and in which he himself, as we have said, had never taken any interest. Mr. Van Houten’s lack of interest in the servants’ lives was, however, by no means reciprocated by the servants. ‘They con- sidered they were lucky in their tuan, who made no unreasonable demands on them, knew nothing about the price of goods in the market, and never stuck his nose into things which didn’t concern him. And of an evening, as they squatted sociably together beside the well in the back compound, in the shade of the great banyan tree, they totted up the number of months the myonva (mem- sahib) had been away already, and asked themselves, with concern, how long the tuan still had to remain alone. With the Javanese houseboy’s typical fine feeling for these matters, Simin had already perceived that the wan had ceased to find peace at home— you had only to look at him to see that he wasn’t his normal self. Old Osman agreed with Simin—nowadays the tuan never came to look at the garden to see whether there were any weeds among the flowers, as he used to do when the nyonya was about. And Cook, Osman’s wife, complained that she no longer got any credit for her skill from her twan, although she gave him every- | thing out of tins, just as he had always liked it. It wasn’t difficult to realize what the tuan missed. Night after night, the servants sat by the well, debating a possible remedy. Until at last Simin’s wife, Minah, suggested one... One afternoon, some days later, Mr. Van Houten had come home from his office and was on his way to the bathroom as usual, in pyjamas and slippers, with a towel over his shoulder, when he saw a young native woman, whom he did not remember having seen before, sitting on the edge of the verandah, opposite the kitchen door. , ; comicloooks.comn) tie Pa } rata A “a ee,