Lost trumpet

42
THE LOST TRUMPET
He made shocked motions towards my chair. I
restrained him.
“No, no, not fleas. Locusts and grasshoppers.”
“M’sieu’ has been out in the sun ?” He was
palpably startled, for he had an affection for me. “I
will bring him some brandy.”
He brought the brandy and I sat and drank it. A
prostitute, poor and painted and tattooed, went by.
A sakkah passed, trudging footsore. A party of
yellow-booted little Syrian men. Camels. A long
emptiness of street. A scowling gendarme. ... I
stared at the street through the brandy fumes.
The Princess Bourrin ?
I, the teller of tales, the romantic tourist-tout,
life’s spectator—-to sit in sick bitterness over a
story told and closed and hidden away on a dusty
shelf! Because of the chance words of a meddling
Englishman I must bring that story from its shelf
again, and scuffle the heat-warped pages, and hear
the clamour and cries of years that the locusts had
eaten . . .
The brandy, of course. Out of the years and out
of the Khalig, gay and unfaded as ever she came,
she who had then perhaps loved me almost as I
loved her—if eighteen may ever love as thirty-five.
The Princess Pelagueya Bourrin; absurdly clad as
were women in those days—though I had gone
unaware of the absurdity; tall and dark and white
and gold—all those, for somehow she had had gold
colour even in the blue blackness of her hair ; white
with our Russian whiteness, that somehow is not