Lost trumpet

THE LOST TRUMPET
43
pallor, though I would use that word but for the
later twist of meaning that it bears in English ; long
of limb—but even then she herself would have said
“leg”, loving to shock Kazan’s starched little circle
of the bourgeois-nobility; a wide mouth, with fine
and full lips and a little shading of dark down below
that seemly, shapely nose. . . . That had been
Pelagueya, lost from sight and hearing of me in the
blur and din of the October Revolution. And,
almost unchanged, almost thirteen years later, it had
been the Pelagueya who had accosted me in the hall
of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo.*
But if unchanged in appearance
I drank off a second glass of brandy, sitting out¬
side Simon’s cafe in the dust and glare of the Sunday
afternoon, remembering then how Pelagueya had told
me she was leaving Cairo as the mistress of an
Englishman, Gault.
And Gault had been my friend.
Loved each other ? They had hated each other at
first, these two. She had sold herself to Gault in a
gay, callous desperation. As brutally he had bought
her; he, the explorer from Sahara, hungry for the
touch and sight of women. They had left Cairo
together, and together, by some queer accident, had
fallen in love—there, at Gault’s Turkish house in
Abu Zabal.
And then Gault had gone away again, the
explorer’s urge upon him; and he had been killed
by raiding Tuareg in the mountains of Mesheen,
*See “The Calends of Cairo.”