Argosy, September 1955 — page 42: what you’re looking at

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

40 H. E. BATES across her black hair. She was uneasy and he could not get near to her. When she turned over and lay on her face he could not see the yellow streak in her hair. Her head was one gentle mass of pure black, undisrupted by that one peroxide streak that always set him quivering inside. ‘The black-haired Miss Vane did not startle him. She seemed quiet and untroubled. He wanted to thrust his face down into the plain unsullied mass of her thick black hair and let himself speak with tenderness of all sorts of things. | Always, at the point when he felt he could do this, she turned over on her back, lifting the front of her body straight and taut in the sun. The peroxide streak flared up. The eyes, too blue and too brilliant, flashed with exactly the same sort of unreality, as if she had dyed them too. ‘*'Tomorrow we must do something,’ here for ever.”’ *“ It’s very pleasant lying here.”’ ‘‘ We must go up to the place where you can see the two coasts. We'll start early and take all day,’ she said. ‘‘ By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask you. You must have come out here very young. How old are you? ”’ “Twenty-seven,” he said. ‘* I beat you by a year,”’ she said. “It’s old, isn’t it? We're creeping on. Don’t you sometimes feel it’s old—all of it slipping away from you? life and that sort of thing? ” He could hear Manuel whistling in the distance, in the bird-cage, and he could see the paler streak in Miss Vane’s hair as she turned and stared at the sky. ‘** IT must say I thought you were older,” she said. He was listening to the inexhaustibly dry, infuriating whistle of Manuel. ““ You don’t look older,’ she said, ‘“‘ but I think you act older. But then men of your age often do.”’ She lifted one hand to shade her eyes from the glare of sun. “The sun gets terrific power by midday,” she said.- “‘ I think 1 ought to have my glasses. Would you fetch them?—do you mind?” He got up and began to walk away and she called after him, ‘‘ In the bedroom. Probably with my dress. I left them there when I changed.”’ In the bedroom he remembered the cabin on the ship. He remembered how she liked things to be done for her. But now the bed, neatly made by Manuel, was not dishevelled. It was only her clothes that lay untidily about where she had undressed and thrown them down. He could not find the sun-glasses. They were not with her dress. He picked up her clothes several times and finally laid them in a chair. The glasses were not in her handbag and they were not on the bed. His inability to find the glasses startled him into nervousness. He approached the bed with trembling hands. He pulled back the coverlet and put his hands under the pillow and let them rest ’ she said. ‘‘ We can’t lie comicloooks.conn =