Argosy (UK), January 1955 — page 22: what you’re looking at

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

20 JOHAN FABRICIUS “Ow! Mahal... how dear!” giggled Ngadi, opening her ‘eyes with astonishment. At that moment Mr. Van Houten, suspecting nothing of the trap which had been laid for him, was sitting at dinner with the Janssens, friends of Thérése’s, and had just told them, with great ~ success—really, he was unusually lively this evening, for him— the story of the Javanese girl he had passed on his way to the bathroom, sitting lonesome outside the kitchen, waiting patiently till nightfall for Ketip, that incorrigible Don Juan, The following night, she was sitting there again. He had not given her another thought, and for that reason it came to him as something of a shock to see her once more—this time, not outside the kitchen door (where Cook was very busy preparing his evening meal), but farther on, just opposite the bathroom. This, in itself, embarrassed him a little; and now he really wanted to know what she was doing around his house. In his white man’s Malay he asked her her business, in a somewhat stern tone. She rose silently to her feet, as supple as a young animal, and said, her eyes shyly fixed on the ground but with an enigmatic smile on her lips, that she was a niece of Minah the nurse and Simin the houseboy, who had invited her to stay with them for a few days. She hoped the tuan would not be angry at finding her there. Her gentle submissiveness had already allayed his irritation completely. “ No, of course not; I only wanted to know... I didn’t understand, yesterday, why you were sitting all on your own outside the kitchen, when nobody was there .. .” He stopped short, suddenly feeling rather confused by this, for him, unusually familiar conversation with a native woman he did not know; though, surprisingly enough, it seemed as if they knew each other just the same, after yesterday. Nor did he under- stand why he had lowered his voice—weren’t other people supposed to hear him, then? “Were you waiting for your aunt?” he asked, awkward as ever, but louder than before.- She said nothing, as if completely at a loss to answer that question. Her only response was to raise her great, dark, moistly luminous Javanese eyes and look helplessly at him. Then she ventured to smile at him again—evidently the only way out of her embarrassment which she could think of. Somewhat abruptly, he turned away from her, and entered the bathroom without more ado, belatedly regretting that he had ever allowed himself to be lured into this fruitless conver- sation. Was it never possible to find out what really went on in comicloooks.comn