Lost trumpet

8o
THE LOST TRUMPET
at dinner, his mistress and I, eating cooling and
cold and execrably-cooked viands, and looked at
each other, and talked unnaturally about unimportant
things—Pelagueya and her wanderings on the
French Riviera, in Italy, in America; Pelagueya
and her letters I had never received or answered
because of a changed address ; Pelagueya bored with
wandering, wandering back to this desert house of
Gault’s
“But in a little while again you will be very bored,”
I said. She shrugged impatiently.
“Of course I will. But what else am I to do ? Oh,
living alone can never satisfy anyone, I think. Living
with too much money. I want to work and argue and
talk—politics and industry and the state. Lovely
and exciting things. I’d love to work in the minutest
sub-department of some government ministry. But
how can I ? How can any of us White Russians
except in our own country ?”
“And why not there ?”
“What—with the animals who killed my brother
in control ?”
Pelagueya’s face clearer to me now than at that
mazed doorway encounter. Unlined still, and fresh,
with that curl of lip that was like the curling of a
finely-moulded petal, and her eyes, great and dark
and gay and—as always they had seemed to me after
Gault’s death—haunted eyes. Nor had that haunted¬
ness yet gone from them, whatever the scenes and
encounters of the past nine months. The scents of
the tangled wreckage that was the garden came in