Lost trumpet

jB THE LOST TRUMPET
fleeting up the stairs and poked her small ferret face
round the door. I said :
“I shall want breakfast in half an hour. And
make it a seemly breakfast, Annie Marie, for it may
be the last that approaching senility will allow me to
appreciate.”
She said : “Gobblimey, kurnel, wot’s wrong ?”
I explained about the buffer with the beard. My
landlady’s Cockney face wrinkled in disgust.
“Aw, on’y some sissy-boy, kurnel. Don’t yew
worry. Yew ain’t old.”
And, nodding, she vanished to heed to my break¬
fast and the piercing howls of her infant. Of all
Heliopolis she was surely the inhabitant most incon¬
gruous—the widow of an English trooper who had
betaken to herself a Greek husband. Of poor
Nicolaos Anastassiou’s language she knew nothing ;
and despite much brow-corrugation over an English
text-book he had as yet been unable to identify a
single phrase that spat from the lips of his spouse.
Pursing small, shapely lips he would look upon her
with admiration and awe and remark “pif!” to her
many scoldings. Such scolding uprose to me now.
He had left the infant unattended. I turned to the
window and my dressing with a new twist to my
thoughts. ... If I had foregone the amorous
possessions had I not foregone the scoldings
also ?
‘ And desire shall fail, and the grasshopper become a
burden.’
So I had read in the English Bible, in those days