Argosy (UK), January 1955 — page 27: what you’re looking at

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

BLACK MAGIC 25 obediently through the front verandah and the sitting-room to his bedroom, head bowed and eyes cast down in a caricature of modesty. | What thoughts were these he was playing with already, he. asked himself in sudden panic, catching his breath. It would be a leap into the abyss—a mad, reckless surrender to a moment _of sensual desire, or perhaps merely to a morbid, ignoble curiosity . . about the unknown. For this indecision alone he would be ashamed of himself to the end of his days, even if nobody else ever knew anything about it. He had himself under control again. Gritting his teeth, he got up and went to his bedroom to dress. Simin came in to clear the table, and took the untouched sweet back to the kitchen. _As Mr. Van Houten stood in front of the mirror buttoning up his snow-white shirt, the picture rose before him for the hun- dredth time. The picture of that native girl out there in the garden. Her bare, brown shoulders, gleaming golden in the lamplight, and the black, voluptuous fall of her coiled hair, with the ornamental silver pin in it—which, again, might have been a little white flower. ‘The soft, flowing line of her arms; the litheness with which she had risen to her feet when he spoke to her; her slender young body, tightly sheathed in the sarong. Her liquid gazelle’s eyes, and that slight, enigmatic smile, the | real significance of which had only lately become clear to him. Her perfume . . . the cloyingly sweet oriental odour which, offensive as it might have been at first to his aesthetic instinct, proved to have obscurely titillated his senses so that he could no longer forget it. He held his breath in order to listen as his servants went past the window, talking together in low tones. He recognized Cook’s high-pitched gabble, Nurse’s subdued giggling, and Osman’s rumbling interjections. Simin said something about the fair, and that the tuan hadn’t said a word about what time they were to be home again. Gone. They were gone. Ketip, who was carrying on with the neighbours’ young nursemaid, was generally out of earshot anyway. Mr. Van Houten never knew what came over him at that moment. For twenty long years he had been a stranger in this vast tropical land, in which he had haughtily led his white man’s life as if no one existed there save him and his. Now, for one long moment, he seemed to be absorbed into that land, to sink, to dissolve into it, powerless to help himself. Perfumes streamed languorously about him; sounds in the night acquired deep significance. comiclooks.comn)